So, for two years, we did a lot of courses.”Ĭompetitive floral art has strict rules and regulations and competitors must follow the principles and elements of design. “She was worried that the Garden Club did not have enough floral art judges. “Jean Motyer was a very big gardener and flower arranger,” she said. She took further courses with the Garden Club to become a judge for floral art competitions. I did not have the problem with colour coordination. Her background as a beauty therapist helped. She joined the Garden Club of Bermuda in 2004, and took a floral art/flower arranging course the following year. I did not know what I was doing when I planted them.”
I spent the first five years planting things, and then the next five years moving them, because they were in the wrong place. We were required to have flowers in window boxes, but that was about it. “When I lived in Switzerland I had a patio. “I had never done much gardening before,” she said. They married in 1993 and moved into a home owned by the Conyers family. If we had met before I went to Switzerland it probably would not have worked.” Two years later she bumped into Hugh Conyers, who had taken her job when she had left for Switzerland years before. The mountains just did not do the same thing for me. “My heart was always in Bermuda,” she said. The marriage broke up but she stayed in Switzerland until she realised she was homesick. In the late 1970s she married a man from Switzerland who was working in hospitality here.įor 13 years they lived just outside Zurich, where Mrs Conyers worked for Estée Lauder and Max Factor. One of Susan Conyers’ roses (Photograph by Jessie Moniz Hardy) When she graduated she returned to Bermuda and worked for Perfume Distributors Ltd. Her father died when she was 14 but her mother, who was a teacher, “had no interest in going back to England, so we stayed”.Īt 17 she went to the UK to study beauty therapy at the London College of Fashion. “My father came out to work for the Bermuda Electric Light Company as a cable jointer,” Mrs Conyers said. She was born in Kent, England and came to Bermuda as a toddler with her parents, Alfred and Joan Dolding, and her brother Michael. I have given so many away to Garden Club members.” “That just takes over,” said Mrs Conyers, who sells her roses and teaches workshops for the Bermuda Rose Society and the Garden Club of Bermuda. Today her garden bursts with all kinds of flowers, plants and palms orange cosmos are everywhere. “So he took that literally and went out and bought a rose bush.” “Someone told him he needed to slow down, and stop and smell the roses,” she said. “So I spend a lot of time propagating and replacing. “If you propagate ten roses and save two, that’s good,” the 69-year-old said. Her garden sits at the top of Berwyn Hill in Paget where her roses are sometimes pummelled by wind and fried by the sun.
Susan Conyers says the secret to propagating roses is patience – a lot of patience. Susan Conyers in her garden in Paget (Photograph by Jessie Moniz Hardy)