‘Nature gives me hope. That is something that I want to share with everyone through my work’

“From a young age I had always loved nature and been fascinated by flowers, and for the last few years I had been telling anyone who would listen that I wanted to be a flower farmer,” says Elsie Harp, founder of a floristry business going from strength-to-strength.

“Noticing how life imitates nature, or rather, how we are nature, has been the biggest inspiration for launching Divina Botanica.

“Nature gives me hope, and that is something that I want to share with everyone through my work.”

A floristry and wellbeing business, Divina Botanica uses flowers to encourage self-care and “that tingly feeling” experienced when seeing something beautiful.

“I started Divina Botanica in the early months of 2019 after a traumatic experience forced me to heal in a way I had never known before,” says Elsie, who lives in Barton Hill. “Flowers became my way of speaking to myself. Having flowers in the house signified life, change, and the beauty that exists in the world.

“When you are that low, it can be extremely difficult to find anything to bring you joy, but I found it again in flowers.”

Through floristry, Elsie hopes to help others through flowers’ medicinal and joyful qualities,” saying: “My business is about inviting you to create more of these ineffable moments in your life, whether that’s through bringing flowers into your home, or through receiving their medicine.”

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Elsie is already having success, having been named as one of the best Black-owned plant shops in the UK. She’s starting a flower farming scholarship and continuing to work in Bristol as a mental health practitioner with young people – alongside running Divina Botanica.

As well as selling floral and self-care goods, Elsie has also created and is selling a zine. Created using her expertise in floristry, trauma-informed mental health practice and herbology, Healing Through Collective Change.

It explores racism as intergenerational trauma and offers herbal medicine and energy psychology practices through different states of trauma, and some meditations too.

The zine is Elsie’s “proudest work to date” and distributed it with herbal medicine packs, and free self-care packs to anyone from the Black community that felt that they needed one.

“I held the welfare space at the first two All Black Lives demonstrations, holding space for anyone who felt they needed support,” she adds.

“At the second event I gave out free flowers, that had been donated in solidarity by a florist and ally, Claire from Floriferous Bristol. I was able to witness that floral self-care in action.”

Elsie Harp also sells ‘wild flower bombs’, containing a mix of 24 types of wild flower seeds native to the UK via Divina Botanica. Photo: Divina Botanica

Despite 2020 serving a “blow” for the Black community (including the deaths of Ahmed Aubery, Brianna Taylor and George Floyd and the disproportionate negative effect of Covid-19 on Black people), Elsie she has been determined to support her community using the powerful essences that flowers provide.

“Flowers have this incredible way of speaking directly to us,” says Elsie. “They are just there, working their magic, attracting our eye or inviting us in with their scent.

“Colour in the world is also a magnificent force (big up the patch of wildflowers opposite the Bear Pit sandwiched in between those two main roads- you got me through some dark times!).

“What happens when you tune into flowers is that you start to notice them everywhere. This is the start of a connection with nature.

“There is a growing body of research demonstrating how vitally important nature connection is. Why? Because life imitates nature. We are nature. We literally cannot live without it.”

Main photo: Divina Botanica

Read more: A blooming wonderful flower business