Floral Study

Despite the fact that I like to look at flowers a lot, I know virtually nothing about them. Apartment-living for the entire span of my adult life and a well-documented black thumb have prevented me from taking on any gardening of my own, which I feel like would be a good way to learn about flora. I don’t know names, I don’t know growing seasons, and I don’t even know enough to add a third thing to the list of things that I don’t know.

I’m planning to DIY the flowers for the wedding, so this total dearth of knowledge could prove problematic. Now, I know the basics- roses, daisies, violets, daffodils, peonies- but much beyond that, I start dividing them into “pretty” or “ehh,” which are probably not such helpful terms when talking to a flower wholesaler. Or anyone, really. I have a flower “recipe” book next to my bed that I’ll pull out maybe once every two weeks, ooh and ahh at the pictures, then fall asleep on, so I’m aiming to learn through osmosis, middle-school-study-tactic-style.

Luckily, my mom seems to know a lot about plants, at least based on her incredibly flourishing garden. So Friday, after we picked up Nick from the Milwaukee airport, I raided my mom’s garden for cuttings of all sorts of stuff so I could play around with some of my newly obtained centerpiece vases. Now, my flower recipe book says you need all sorts of stuff to arrange flowers, like wires and floral foam and other such arcane tools of the trade.

My approach was to more or less jam the flowers into vessels, mostly out of laziness and partially because I like the wild, strewn-about look. There’s nothing more irritating to me than really organized arrangements, like rose balls– it takes everything beautiful about flowers and stuffs it into man-made constraints. I like chaos in my florals.

Or at least that’s what I’m going to tell people.