Kristin was far from the first bride to change her mind about her flower choices, only the timing made the switch a bit more dramatic. We had worked together over many months and across more miles - she was living and working in Houston while I'm generally found at home in Groton. We met only once, on a rainy April morning at the Taj Hotel in Boston, where she and her fiance would be married the following August. Through the course of innumerable emails and telephone conversations, Kristin remained certain she wanted an all white and ivory bouquet of mini callas and cymbidium orchids for herself, while her bridesmaids, wearing rich burgundy silk dresses, would carry more colorful posies. Less than two weeks before her wedding - her blooms already on order at the Boston Flower Exchange - Kristin decided she wanted a rich compote of color to match the rest of her wedding flowers. We came up with a bouquet of callas - eggplant, pink, and Picasso (a sensual mix of cream and purple), green cymbidium orchids, and lavender lisianthus. For her bridesmaids' bouquets, we added deep pink dendrobium orchids to purple lisianthus and Picasso callas. Nervous about the last-minute nature of things, I changed the flower order (Sometime I want to write about the hidden heroes of these occasions - the flower vendors at the market, so accommodating and informative) and the day before her wedding put everything together. It worked, to everyone's delight. To me, Kristin's bouquet proves flowers reign supreme as the expression of an occasion whose meaning defies logic, definition, and easy choices.
The painstaking labor of Victorian artist Mary Delany (British, 1700-1788) boggles the mind. Her artwork -- graceful, detailed, and as fresh and accurate as the more famous French botanical artist Pierre Joseph Redoute (1759 - 1840) -- has moved into the third floor of the Sir John Soane Museum, 13 Lincolon's Inn Field in London. (http://www.soane.org/next.html. Here's a wonderful place to pass a few hours enveloped by another era entirely. Soane designed the British Houses of Parliament, amassing a treasury of objects and artwork that fills every wall and corner and surface of his townhouse. Adding to the charms of his home, Delany's artwork, recently returned from several months at the Yale Center for British Art, offers a visual treat on top of a treat. If you like flowers and men and women of genius, you'll find happiness in excess right here.
Living amongst such a collection must have been a feat. It is difficult to imagine how Soane's wife, two sons, servants, and pets, not to mention guests, managed to reach across the breakfast table, let alone change their clothes. For Soane was an inveterate collector, like so many educated people of wealth and prominence in the 18th and 19th centuries when, as Kipling wrote, "The sun never set on the British Empire." Vast the scope, and utterly without scruples the reach of archeologists, scholars, and amateur enthusiasts alike who plundered Greece, Rome, and Egypt for relics. The Elgin Marbles at the British Museum are a perfect example. Thus, Sir John Soane's home is itself a "promiscuous assemblage," as the Duchess of Portland's famous museum collection was called, of Greek and Roman terracotta, Medieval objects, artwork by Hogarth, Reynolds, Canaletto, and others, as well as classical and Egyptian antiquities, to summarize briefly. Among Soane's many possessions is a dazzling signet ring belonging to Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he much admired.
But Mary Delany's work is the subject here. She had a passion for natural history (Linnaean's system of categorizing plant and animal species had just come into vogue) and the decorative arts, a love of flowers, shells, and china -- shared by her friend the Duchess of Portland. Her botanical collages made from tiny bits of painted paper, are only a part of this exhibition, but they reveal her extraordinary eye and hand, as well as her vast knowledge of botany. So do her journals of plant illustrations, her embroidery - more flowers exquisitely stitched on large panels of black velvet. The exhibition includes her intimate oil portraits and landscapes. Clearly, Delany was a cultivated woman of genius, character, and rare accomplishment, equipped with a gift for friendships, too. Much of her shell collection, also on display at the Soane Museum, belonged to the Portland Museum, whose contents was auctioned off in April 1786. The cabinets of tiny drawers filled with shells will delight the miniaturist. Indeed, like the 21st-century Maine artist, Brian White, whose shell-flower-embellished wedding dresses have appeared at the Peabody Essex Museum and the Portland Museum of Art, Delany spent her spare hours making shell flowers to cover a chapel ceiling and a chandelier.
The Sir John Soane Museum offers an intimate glimpse of minds drawn to the world of beauty in art and nature. If you find yourself in London, take in this amazing show.
Five o’clock Friday morning, speeding down Route 2 on a mission to pick up blooms for the Fruitlands Museuma' Open House this Saturday. What’s needed: 10 or 11 arrangements – seven cocktails, four centerpieces for 60-inch round tables – one raised piece among them, and one long and low arrangement for a rectangular table.
The setting: A rural venue with a Transcendental - Shaker - American Indian legacy. A red farmhouse of simple antique Colonial rooms has been turned into the Alcott Restaurant and Tea Room. Sunlight brings delicious notes of spring through the old windows, and beyond – a stunning view over the Nashoba River Valley to Mount Monadnock, a view that resonates with at least four centuries of recorded history, a view that drew Bronson Alcott and other aspirants to this very spot in 1843, when the Transcendentalists set up their (alas, short-lived) Utopian experiment known as Fruitlands.
The flowers must be romantic, rustic, elegant, pretty. It's a treat to rely on whim and inspiration at the flower market. This is seldom possible in the busy wedding season when I order blooms ahead for arrangements long discussed and visualized. A rare opportunity, a time to learn new things. And I do. I discover a new (to me) dendrobium orchid with slender twisting petals in a subtle pink and white stripe. It looks far more exotic than the usual rounded-petaled dendrobium, and is irresistible. My only rationale - compared to Marie Antoinette's extravagances, this is tiddly winks.
Soon the car is filled with brown paper sleeves of creamy freesia, blue delphinium, burgundy ranunculus, purple genestra, white and purple stock, pink dendrobium orchids, seeded eucalyptus, steel grass, white lisianthus, sweet pea of a dangerous pink, pussy willow, and curly willow. More than I need? Invariably. And yet it always turns out every stem finds a place, and I couldn’t have done with less.
Here are two arrangements I came up with for the open house – a long-and-low for the reception table; it has a traditional look, except for a few details - steel grass cut short in a sort of Japanese-like fan, and an asymmetry that gives it new life, and a cocktail vase of those new dendrobium orchids.
A February day like any other – overcast, drizzly, and cold – only this is England not Massachusetts; the light is soft and spring imminent. The pansies bloom in London’s window boxes, and in the countryside, where we stay for two nights, drifts of snowdrops splash the green grass. It was an embarrassingly short trip with reverberations that went back decades. We had gathered to celebrate the life (and honor the death) of my children's 97-year-old Granny, and we managed to take it all in with a mixture of sadness at the swift passage of even such a long life, and awe at the beauty and history of the visible world around us, a sense of the sacred augmented by flowers, as well as by friends and family; a sense of the past, and the rituals of mourning.
The ceremony took place in a tiny 13th century chapel… tiny and yet, like the proverbial Volkswagen Beetle out of which dance a dozen circus clowns, some 90 guests find comfort and peace on wooden pews inside the ancient stone walls. Little décor is needed in such a setting. Rather the gift of a sensitive hand and eye – a long-and-low arrangement of miniature yellow daffodils with moss and ivy sits on a window ledge in the apse. So natural, so pure; these flowers possess all the virtues of simplicity. The designer has clearly drawn on the promise of spring to sanctify and adorn the moment.
In London neighborhoods dense with boutiques and restaurants the predominant colors are gray and white interrupted by green parks and peaceful squares. Yet wee occasionally spy a flower stall (reminiscent of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady?) nestled against a church wall, filled with sheaths of bright blooming lilies, roses, and the like, along with piquant bouquets set into niches in the stone facade. No one is minding the stall; perhaps the flower seller has nipped into the next door cafe for a cappuccino; and we all remark on these blooms that offer such delight to passersby.
And now I must admit we lost our digital camera at the British Museum, and all the shots of flowers in the museum and on the street vanished with it.
