Transcendental Blooms

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.