Market Scene : Lights! Camera!--Flowers! : A young British florist petals his way to profits with eye-catching displays for movies and television.

Moviegoers made the British film “Four Weddings and a Funeral” a surprise hit of 1994, polishing the stars of Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell and giving rave notices to another player, the spectacular floral arrangements.

Simon Lycett, the young florist who arranged the displays, found himself a sudden celebrity. He said a White House designer, noting his name on the credits, phoned to discuss the lavish florals that gave the film a special English touch.

“It was quite flattering,” recalled the 28-year-old florist from Warwickshire in the heart of England. “The lady had seen the flowers in the movie. She wanted a large arrangement for a big party the Clintons were giving. So I spent two weeks giving her advice by fax.”

These days, Lycett is the hottest florist in London, with most of his time spent consulting rather than arranging. He has given up his shop to concentrate on free-lance jobs.

Consequently, while he occasionally does the big-budget wedding and other celebratory occasions involving great displays of flowers, his most profitable contracts involve work for movie and television sets, as well as commercials.

He has done the flowers for “Scarlett,” the TV sequel to “Gone With the Wind,” and for “Restoration,” a film yet to be released.

And he has provided eye-catching yard and table arrangements for the commercials of a garden-tool producer.

“It’s not as easy as it may look, doing a commercial,” Lycett says. “The shooting for a series may run for weeks, and the floral background in the yard has to remain the same--looking fresh. It’s up to me to keep it that way.”

Lycett, a thin man with short brown hair, came by his trade naturally, growing up in one of the greenbelt areas of England--a country where gardening is a national pastime and the annual Chelsea Flower Show a major event.

A recent survey of television viewers, for instance, said Britons were three times more interested in watching shows on gardening than on sex: 76% of viewers said they enjoyed “Garden Club,” while only 14% found “The Good Sex Guide” program “very enjoyable.”

Lycett remembers being taken to local horticultural shows as a child. With the support of his mother, he began to enter them, contributing his work to flower festivals, church affairs, civic functions--once for a royal visit--and developed a reputation as a designer. The son of an engineer, Lycett went to a technical college but clearly preferred flowers to machinery.

He came to London in 1987 to work with Robert Day, a noted florist, in the Pimlico district, and later shifted to one of the city’s premier organizations, Pulbrook & Gould, purveyors to the Royal Family.

As his reputation grew, Lycett started picking up some movie assignments. For the film “Where Angels Fear to Tread,” he said, “We had to arrange a change of outdoor seasons over a two-year period in just a few weeks’ shooting.”

To create film and television backdrops, Lycett keeps extensive files on formal and informal English gardens.

“I’ve got reference albums of garden walls with 40 different kinds of foliage,” he says. “Old brick, new brick, dark brick, light brick, Cotswold stone--with moss, vines, flowers, anything.

“So with the director, we decide on a budget and then how to meet our needs for our scheme: fresh flowers, plants, dry flowers, cut flowers into vases, whatever.

“In some cases I go to the new Covent Garden flower market to buy flowers on a daily basis. Other times, I might hire bushes, shrubs or plants, which are trucked to our location. There are garden-renting firms, you know.

“If I’m decorating some kind of an exhibitor’s show, I may have to order repeatedly to keep the display--at a trade fair, say--looking fresh.

“The most difficult part of the job is satisfying an art director’s concept of a garden that doesn’t exist, or never existed.”

Lycett said art directors prefer the English look “because to a certain extent the English invented the modern garden, and the rest of the world copied it.”

He was selected to do the floral work for “Four Weddings” when the producers admired a backdrop Lycett provided for a 1990 memorial service for Jim Henson, creator of “The Muppets,” at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

“The hardest part of ‘Four Weddings’ was to create a different look with the flowers for each wedding, to give each its individual character. I used peonies, roses, lilies of the valley, stephanotis, delphiniums, sweet peas, cornflowers, Casablanca lilies--all sorts of things. It was a great six weeks.”

As a result of his work in “Four Weddings,” Lycett is now in high demand, including, he says, “invitations from American garden clubs to talk about flower styling.”

But success is fueled by hard work, he says.

“You’re up at 4 a.m., often in freezing cold, working with the flowers, wiring the displays to the frame and making sure they’re sound and safe, lifting stone around the display, shifting ladders and trellises, breaking fingernails, getting calluses.

“It’s hard, unglamorous work, not just sitting at a bench, making pretty little posies.

“But I don’t see it as a chore,” Lycett said. “I’m lucky to be paid to do what I’d almost do for nothing.”