Floral Design vs Flowers in a Vase
This past week I had an interesting conversation with a neighborhood leader. He shared that he had recently stopped buying flowers at the grocery store, as he’d become aware of the environmental cost to the planet most grocery store flowers create. He said since then, he’d started to wonder what the difference is between buying a bunch of flowers—slipping them out of their sleeve, perhaps (not always) cutting them a little shorter, and plunking them in a vase—and the flowers he bought from a florist. Where did they differ? It’s a valid question, and as such questions do, it led us to talking about art.
Floral design is a creative art in which plants are the chosen medium. It is three-dimensional; viewed from all sides. It deals with form, line, texture, movement, light, shadow, color. Just as a painter steps back to see, to feel, where the next stroke should be, the floral designer steps back often to see and feel where there is dissonance (and when to keep it), where there is too much heaviness, or not enough weight. Where there is a hole between forms that needs filling, or where a grouping of flowers have not been given enough room to breathe and show their full form and personality as individuals. A floral designer paints a picture with flowers. For large installations, the designer may create an entire visceral experience: an immersion—like walking into a painting.
Beyond this, floral design is also highly individual and personal: although technique is taught and practiced, each designer has their own ethos, style and mood. Although being able to create a very wide variety of designs is critical, there is still that something—that juxtaposition, placement, gradation, form, asymmetry (or symmetry)—that declares a particular designer’s work as their own. The designs emerge from a communication between the plants and the person: perhaps, for some designers, they are sensitive to what the plant wants to do (curl upward? Bend down and to the left? Rest upon the rim of the vase? Float out?) and allow it to be so, while for other designers it is about bending the plant to the will of the hand: pushing it outside its natural shape into something else altogether. The end result of the floral designer’s efforts is then given to the client. The hope is that they will be pleased; that the brief, if given, has been met. There’s the transactional aspect, for certain. But what is being transacted is not flowers plunked in a vase. It is floral design: a created art piece.
Sometimes, flowers plunked in a vase are outrageously beautiful. Satisfying to the eye and soul. But would that same combination of blooms, if plunked into many different vessels, under the hands of many different people, always satisfy? Why or why not? Perhaps in the first case the vase the individual happened to choose was in proportion to the flowers they had bought, so when the “plunk” occurred, the flowers weren’t swallowed by the vessel, or, alternatively, left sticking up, stems showing like so many long, skinny giraffe legs. Perhaps the grouping had a naturally balanced combination of round, long-lined, cup, dainty and textural blooms and foliage. Perhaps the colors of the blooms were complimentary, or dynamic. Nature, after all, is innately beautiful in and of itself. Yet flowers “plunked” in a vase are accidental, so to speak. Putting flowers in a vase without taking the elements of design into account is a roll of the dice: it may work, it may not. During the creative process of floral design, conversely, the “does it work, does it not work” question is what guides the work, so that, at the end, when the floral designer feels it is finished, that question has been answered.
Whether or not those who behold and experience the floral art agree that it “works” is of course another topic altogether. But the creative art of floral design, just like the creative art of writing, or painting, or ceramics, or dance or film or any of the rest of the creative arts, is an art. Flowers “plunked” in a vase can be pretty. Beautiful, even. But, I would argue, they are not art. —Agree? Disagree? I’d love to hear your opinions in the comments.