From Derbyshire to Italy: Well-dressing volunteers demonstrate traditional craft at Europe's largest festival dedicated to art of floral carpets

Eleven members of Holymoorside Well Dressing demonstrated the traditional craft at the ‘Pietra Ligure in fiore’, the International Exhibition of Artistic Flower Arrangements. The trail-blazing volunteers were the first representatives from England at the festival which is held every three years in the small town of Pietra Ligure in northern Italy.

John Botham, chairman of the well dressing group, said: “We always celebrate an anniversary, and for this well dressing, we chose the 300th anniversary of the publication of 'The Four Seasons' violin concertos by Vivaldi. The main picture is a Derbyshire scene through all four seasons. It is not a real view, but a composite picture of typical Derbyshire features: rolling fields, moors, a gritstone edge, dry stone wall, and the crooked spire.

”It went down a storm. We normally do our well dressing in a village where people can come and look while we are doing it; we might get two or three people if we’re lucky. In Italy, we were getting crowds, half a dozen people all taking pictures of us and another dozen looking...they were fascinated. The Italians would stick their heads in between us and look closely to see what we were doing! We got many compliments.

"We had to order the flowers, which we’d never done before. We usually ask people in Holymoorside if we can scrounge flowers from their gardens so we’ve never really counted what we’ve used. The interesting thing was finding the greens and bits and bobs for the texture. We used a lot of leaves and pine cones. The gritstone edge is bark from a tree in the botanical gardens that had shed some bits.

“The other groups created floral carpets all over the old town, but we made a traditional well dressing at the side of the church in the main square. Andrea Bergallo (the organiser) was very helpful in meeting our requirements for a vertical frame, and 250kg of clay, on top of providing the flowers.”

Forty teams from Italy and exhibitors from Mexico were among the hundreds of participants invited to take part in the largest European festival of its kind which drew thousands of visitors.

John, who is an architect, said: “It was an amazing experience - we had a fantastic time. There were so many groups doing it that there was a huge buzz. It was great for meeting people from all over Europe.”

The Holymoorside team received informal invitations to demonstrate well dressing at flower festivals in Lithuania, Spain, Poland, Umbria and Lazio in Italy and has also been invited back to Pietra Ligura.

In return, an invitation has been issued to festival organiser Andrea to visit Holymoorside this summer and see a new well dressing which will be unveiled on August 21.

Plans are in the pipeline for the volunteer well dressers to share videos and slides from their Italian adventure with Holymoorside villagers later in June.