How to arrange flowers
The homosexuality of the daylily. A raven barfing daisies.
We don’t think of early Romans as exuding a Rousseauan sentimentality about nature, and yet: nearly every peasant family of the Republic maintained a flower garden. The status of the flower as an essential good, no less than meat or wool, went unquestioned.
It is a curiosity that gathering and arranging flowers has been a feminine activity since the dawn of domestic gardening. Why should this be so? Is bouquet-making so different than painting? It’s easy and economical, which are virtues historically associated with logical practical menfolk rather than fanciful beauty-loving ladyfolk. And yet the flower-gatherers of literature and painting are almost inevitably female….
There are three stages of bouquet-ing: The hunt, the selection, the composition. Each is attended by a different flavor of intoxication.
Begin with the hunt. This is the part where you voyage outdoors with a pair of shears swinging jauntily from your thumb, ready to decapitate the nearest blossoms. A chemical high sets in as you approach your prey. The organisms known as actinomycetes enter your nostrils, and these actinomycetes signal to the olfactory system that You Are Now Among Fertile Soil. The high is specifically and noticeably erotic. [Insert eggplant emoji, in both senses.]
I imagine there is some evo-psych theory about why actinomycetes make people feel euphoric, and I imagine it boils down to the idea that an early human might have wandered onto fertile ground and caught a whiff of the soil, and that those who experienced the idea that “Gee, this place makes me inexplicably happy / perhaps I should plant food here and thrive” experienced an adaptive advantage.
(I’m not a scientist.)
The second part— the selection of the flowers—offers the intoxication of a game. It nestles comfortably into the definition of “play” that Johan Huizinga maps out in Homo Ludens. To seek the Correct Flowers is to embark on a bounded strategic mission characterized by mirth (“Ooh, THIS bud!”) and tension (“But WHERE will I find the next bud?”). It exists beyond the ordinary appetitive processes of life; it is undertaken for its own sake.
If you ever find yourself in a state of ennui, go outside and gather flowers—it is impossible to sustain doldrums while doing so. If there are no flowers, gather leaves. If no leaves, twigs. Or pebbles. A pyramid of carefully-selected pebbles erected upon a desk or dining table is nothing to sneeze at, aesthetically. Even if you do sneeze at it, physically, it won’t topple due to pebble physics.
The third part, the composition—more on that in a second.
This morning, August 5, I wandered outside with my shears. The garden is in bad shape. BLD has ravaged the beech trees, leaving them freckled and puny. The daylilies, which I always think of as Gay (as in homosexual) are no longer partying; some unknown blight or perhaps the extreme heat has broken their spirit. Today, for the first time in recent memory, the quantity of blooming daylilies in the garden is low enough to count. There are 12.
But scarcity works on a huntress the way hunger works on an appetite, so I was feeling particularly keen with my shears— like my vision had suddenly sharpened to 20/2.
I located the remaining frothy domes of hydrangea and wrenched a fistful of silver ragwort from the soil. (Silver ragwort always strikes me as the Goth Teenager of plants, perhaps because it shows to best advantage when paired with black, and/or when illuminated by the moon.)
Further into the woods a few stragglers were still available: a random Thai basil that had broken free from someone’s garden and was ferally prospering. Purple loosestrife. Cohosh. Milkweed. Lobed pink stars of Sweet Robert, which are months late this season and which remind me of my own late Sweet Robert (an uncle Bobby who died in 2021; his memory an eternal embrace).
Clip clip clip.
When my handful of stems reached critical girth I went inside, pausing first to check for ticks (none visible but one found later, and violently murdered.)
This is the part of the process where flower-gathering gains the meditative quality of painting. Except, it is easier than painting, because you do not need pigments or manual dexterity or knowledge of Titianic scumbling; all you need is a pair of working eyeballs. I mean, not even a pair. Just one! One eyeball!
I should warn you that what follows is My Way of flower-arranging and there is nothing special or clever about it. I have read—well, “read” is aspirational, let’s say “somersaulted through”—many books on flower arranging and little of what they advise has altered my process, although they have provided non-instructive enchantments.
For example.
Modern Abstract Flower Arrangements (1964) by Emma Hodkinson Cyphers begins by paraphrasing Socrates (unnecessarily) and proceeds to abuse the word “utilize” to a vexing extent, but makes up for these sins with fantastic photographs of e.g. a date-palm-and-fungi amalgamation manipulated to suggest "the freedom of action painting." Or the photograph of materials meant to depict a sea cow but which more closely resembles a raven barfing daisies.
Or take a third flower arrangement, titled Bicycles, which is crafted with fresh gladioli and looks like a sadistic flower that has spontaneously gained consciousness and is using it to whip other flowers with a strand of kelp.
The arrangements in Ms. Cyphers’s (“if that is her real name”) book may be the loveliest Rorschach tests I’ve ever seen.
But back to you.
To begin composing, select a vessel. I advocate a humble vessel, like a rinsed jam jar or plain jug, because I believe the focus of the beholder should pool around the flora rather than its containment. Fill the vessel with water.
Now, if you judge by books on the topic, there are thousands of formal rules governing the craft of flower arranging. This is excellent news for the besotted amateur, because such an excessive quantity of rules can only mean that there are no rules at all.
So rest your bounty on a surface, spreading and grouping it by species. Brush away spiders, defoliate dead leaves. Add a few stems to the vessel. Continue to add. Then start subtracting. Arithmetic your way into an arrangement that suits you. Use clippers to snip an inch or two from random stems; vary the height of the arrangement!
Seek color combinations that give pause— followed by delight.
Place a forsythia branch at a 62º angle.
Add a rose to your bouquet—but place it UPSIDE-DOWN.
Take the posture of a flower as your guide. If a stem stands erect, award it military prominence in your composition. If the bud droops, give it a drunken perch over the rim—the “bar”—of the vessel.
Think of yourself as a transparent tube, with vegetation entering one end and flowing out the other in a stream of divine beauty. All you have to do is facilitate.
