These are often the best people when it comes to flowers. Open at least 5 days a week, many offer same day delivery and can craft just about any design you can imagine. If you’re after an unusual flower or highly bespoke display, they’ll need a bit of notice, but 24 hours is usually enough.

Most florist shops and certainly our Good Florist Guide shops – will be staffed by fully trained, time-served florists (it takes five years to pass the exams) bursting with creative flare and know all the right conditioning techniques to make sure your flowers last.

Are all shops good? Sadly not. We’ve seen some dreadful ones who we wouldn’t want you to go anywhere near. That’s exactly why we started Good Florist Guide over 20 years ago!

Supermarkets are great, cheap and super accessible option, if not maybe a little boring, simply because they have to stick to tried-and-tested varieties. A specialist florist can pick and choose from thousands of different flowers. As we’re sure you’ll have noticed, supermarkets don’t always have a huge range to choose from and you’re often hard pressed to find too many options beyond Roses, Carnations, Chrysanthemums and Alstroemeria.

Budget-wise, you’ll often find a good florist will be just as reasonable. It’s a total myth that you need a second mortgage to buy from a florist. So whilst supermarkets are great for a quick, stuff-it-in-the-trolley fix, our best advice will always be ‘see what your local good florist guide shop or stall has to offer first’, support an independent trader and have a more enriching shopping experience.

Street stalls, especially in progressive cities like London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol to name but a few are now very on trend. As a general observation, they’re usually a little bit cheaper because traditionally their overheads are lower than traditional shops.

However, as rent and rates go up, more florists have moved onto the street and are offering a full service. Therefore, don’t always expect to pay loads less unless it’s one of those stalls that clears old stock, piles it high and sells it cheap.

Proper studio setups are often fully trained florists who want a better work/life balance and to avoid the overheads of a 9–5 retail premises. They can normally offer everything a shop-based florist does but won’t always have a walk-in service, offer same day delivery or have a ready to go range. As with shops, there are plenty of amazing studio businesses who are fully Good Florist Guide accredited. 

However, it’s also a name adopted by a lot of wannabe florists (see ‘Kitchen Sinkers’) so you need to be careful you are buying from a proper studio florist. Our best advice is to check out their website and look at the pictures.

These are the florists that specialise in the sort of drop dead gorgeous design work you see at weddings, parties, fashion shows, product launches and film premiers.

Catering for the glitterati as well as us mere mortals these florists offer a completely bespoke service and will be totally dedicated to your special event so it will probably be ‘by appointment’ only.

Some wonderful florists have started from home, but they quickly moved into a studio or shop. However, along with bad shops (the ones who don’t appear in our GFG!) the bad Kitchen Sinkers are a group of people we want to save you from.

They work from home, often buy the flowers from supermarkets and their training can be just a few YouTube videos. While they think they know what they are doing, they often don’t, and can let customers down badly, especially on weddings. There are some good ones out there but in the main we would say avoid.

Carnations and cheap roses that have been sitting in stagnant water for days. We aren’t even going to go there … and neither should you; especially if you’re wanting to make an impression.

We know they try hard but in our opinion the gift of garage flowers is desperation wrapped up in cellophane.