The secret to making an extremely good paper flower is not making an extremely good paper flower.

That is what Christina Wilson has discovered in the four years she has been a paper florist.

Ms Wilson, of Cherise by Christina, said: “For people just starting out it can be quite stressful because they are trying to get everything right. They eventually realise they want the imperfections. To make a paper flower look real, you have to put a tear in it, here and there. Some of the petals need to bend back.”

She cuts all her petals by hand.

“Every flower is unique, the way every person is unique,” she said. “There are many life lessons involved in doing this.”

She and her husband moved to Bermuda from Guernsey in January for her husband’s job. She now has a work permit to sell her paper creations.

Her bouquets of Bermuda flowers can now be found for sale in the gift shop at the Masterworks Museum in the Botanical Gardens in Paget, and at the Bermuda National Trust headquarters at Waterville in Paget. She also has flowers on display at the Bermuda Arts Centre in Dockyard.

“I wasn’t always an artist,” Ms Wilson told The Royal Gazette. “I started as a Mandarin translator.”

A few years ago, she left that to make bespoke wedding stationery in England using a variety of paper-crafting techniques.

“Then I discovered the world of paper flowers,” she said. “I took an afternoon course with a lady who taught me how to make a peony. I loved it immediately.”

It was right after Covid social distancing.

“I went back home and played around with paper flowers,” she said. “I followed a few books that I got and then decided to go off in my own direction.”

Today she is skilled enough that folks sometimes confuse her paper flowers for real ones.

“People go over and smell them,” she said.

They do that so often that she is looking into putting some kind of perfume on them.

“It would be nice to play with fragrances,” she said.

Before coming to Bermuda, many of her customers bought her bouquets for weddings, sometimes looking for something novel, and other times needing something hypoallergenic.

Last summer she made centrepieces for her brother’s wedding reception.

“There were ten tables and each of them represented somewhere the couple had visited together or a place that meant something to them,” she said. “So I made native and national flowers from the different countries. That was a lot of flowers.”

Her favourite flowers for the event were rhododendron caucasicum or snow roses from the country of Georgia.

“They also have marigolds over there,” she said. “The most complicated flower to make were these Peruvian cantuta flowers. They were a long bell shape. The project was really fun to research.”

Ms Wilson spends much of her time looking up different flowers. Her go-to reference book is the Royal Horticultural Society New Encyclopaedia of Plants and Flowers.

“The flowers are always on my mind,” she said. “When I go for a walk, I look at flowers. I like to examine the back as well as the front, and also all the tiny parts, such as the stamen, to make my flowers as accurate as possible.”

One of her challenges is deciding what stage of flower development to focus on.

“My signature look is to include buds in my wedding bouquets,” she said. “That shows a promise and potential of something more to come.”

One of her secrets is the paper itself. She uses a particular crepe paper.

“Then it is about how you cut and shape them,” she said.

The length of time it takes depends on the flower itself.

“I can do a couple of heads of old English roses in a day,” she said. “It depends on the style of them and the colouring. It is a labour of love.”

Making paper flowers has become an obsession. Often in the evenings she can be found shaping petals as she watches television.

So far, she is loving Bermuda.

“The arts community is very vibrant and welcoming,” Ms Wilson said. “Here I have arrived as an artist, partly because of a slight shift in direction. I am still keen to do weddings but I have shifted more to the arts. In Guernsey I was very much a wedding professional. There were lots of groups of female entrepreneurs who would get together.”

She loves gardening and growing real flowers, but is concentrating on herbs and vegetables at the moment.

Her parents were her ultimate inspiration. Her mother was an artist, painting and stitching, while her father was a microbiologist who instilled in her a love of nature.

“We used to go out for walks a lot,” Ms Wilson said. “He introduced me to a lot of flowers when we were out.”

The Wilsons have lived in many different places around the world. The name of her business, Cherise by Christina, was inspired by two years living in Japan. Cherise is French in origin, meaning cherry.

“I was obsessed with the cherry blossoms in Japan, as was the whole nation,” Ms Wilson said. “It is a huge thing there. People have parties under the cherry blossoms, and there is a focus on seasonality. You would find people of all ages taking photographs of flowers. There are regular reports on how far the cherry blossoms have spread across the country. When I first started doing the wedding stationery, I wanted to use cherry blossoms within my own branding, because they symbolise new beginnings.”

Ironically, people often mistakenly think her name is Cherise.

“I get called that a lot,” she said with a smile.

• For more information, see her websitecherisebychristina.com