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Monday, February 08, 2010
Olympic Bouquets, Green with Piety
After much deliberation, the Vancouver olympic committee has settled on a monochromatic bouquet for the 1800 winners. O (what’s with you?) Canada!
The winner after 23 attempts: the design chosen for the 2010 Olympic bouquet.
Photo: Bill Keay, for Canwest News
The “green-gos” have spoken. Last week, the powers that Olympicize introduced the bouquets that winners in the 2010 Winter games will wave.
“The Olympic bouquets are a soft, elegant green, with five B.C.-grown spider mums in the centre, surrounded by layers of monkey grass, aspidistra leaves and hypericum berries imported from Ecuador.”
What do you think?
We reported awhile back that June Strandberg, partnering with Margitta Schulz of North Vancouver, had won the contract to design and make the games’ 1800 victory bouquets. Strandberg’s Just Flowers, based in Surry, hires ex-convicts and trains them for livelihoods in floristry, giving her a conscionable advantage over the competition.
June Strandberg, who will direct the making of 1800 victory bouquets
Photo: Jenelle Schneider, for Vancouver Sun
We’ve since learned that Strandberg is not only compassionate; she has the patience of Job. The Vancouver Sun reported on the extended “plea-bargaining” involved in choosing a design for the Olympic flowers. Strandberg had hoped to use only native flora of British Columbia: “We wanted the arrangement to look natural,” she said, “like something you would see if you drove up the mountain. But that is not what they wanted.”
The Vancouver Olympic Committee wasn’t impressed by indigenous salal or boxwood, and then nixed pussy willow for fear that a tossed bouquet might put somebody’s eye out. So Strandberg and Schulz kept juggling with the event’s muted colors – blue, green, and white.
“If I put in a white statice and blue iris and green mums they took out the white statice,” Strandberg told Steve Whysall of the Sun. “Next time they said ‘Cut back on the irises.’”
After 23 outtakes, the panelists chose an all-green design tied with a blue bow. The ‘Revert’ spider chrysanthemum (definitely on the chartreuse side) will be coming from Quik’s Farm’s greenhouses in Chilliwack, B.C., but everything else will fly in from an unnamed Ecuadorian farm; the foliage was to start arriving today. On Friday, the team will begin making the victory bouquets, 80-150 per a day. The Olympic committee asks that all 1800 arrangements look identical, which is tough (also kind of lifelessly peculiar. These are flowers, folks, not ski poles!)
From the photos available thus far, the 2010 Olympic bouquets look both striking (as in, weaponlike) and muted—a cross between a feather duster and ornamental cauliflower. We suppose that the preferred simile will be a torch, since the Olympic fire, passed hand to hand for weeks, builds anticipation for the games and will ignite the competition this Friday.
Made of chrysanthemum, monkey grass, aspidistra leaves and hypericum berries, the bouquets were introduced last week.
Photo: Jonathan Hayward, for the Canadian Press
But an all-green bouquet? It doesn’t take a Ralph Nader to figure out the politics of this choice. The committee stresses that though not all the plants included are local, the South American farm involved has been carefully vetted. “Strandberg says she has investigated thoroughly to make sure the foliage is not being ‘raped from the jungle’ and that the farm itself operates in a sustainable, environmentally friendly way and has a reputable employment practice.” Even so, background checks weren’t enough. Today’s media environment demands a “meatless” color scheme, too.
Call us apprehensive but open. We wish June, Margitta, the 22 grads of Just Beginnings’ program and all those bobsledders well. Maybe green torches against snow-covered slopes will be dazzling.
That “sustainable” snow should be arriving any time now from Baltimore.
Culture & Society • Florists • Secular Customs • (0) Comments • Permalink
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Flag Football
For tomorrow’s Superbowl, we’re going with the Saints and their ancient floral insignia.
Emblazoned with a spiky “flower,” the fleur-de-lis, a helmet of the New Orleans Saints
Photo: Getty
We’re backing to Saints in tomorrow’s Superbowl for any number of reasons – but let’s keep it floral. The New Orleans NFL team’s insignia is the fleur-de-lis, a stylized flower with ancient roots and many manifestations around this city, the sensual capital of the U.S.A.
“It does not just represent the Saints,” running back Reggie Bush told The New York Times. “It’s amazing. You see it everywhere. You see it on churches and in restaurants.” The Times’ Joe LaPointe has a good synopsis of the emblem’s history, and we’ve run one here, too (sans pigskin).
Art & Media • Florists • Secular Customs • (1) Comments • Permalink
Friday, January 29, 2010
Growing Luck in Malaysia
Can one lottery winner inspire a new floral tradition for the lunar year? A Malaysian nurseryman chirps, yes!
In Malaysia, this variety of pedilanthus is a favorite for the lunar new year.
Photo: The Star
The lunar new year arrives late this year, February 14, but horticulturists and florists worldwide have long been preparing. Traditional plants of the celebration
include bong mai, yellow chrysanthemum, flowering plum and narcissus, all early bloomers. The trick is handling them just so they flower on the holiday itself.
This year, along with the old customs, there’s 21st century spin in the marketing of holiday plants. If Apple, Google and Scott Brown can do it, why not nurserymen?
Culture & Society • Cut-Flower Trade • Secular Customs • (0) Comments • Permalink
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Walt Mayr: Nurseryman/Adventurer
Success in the nursery business requires risk-taking, curiosity, people-skills and tenacity. Success in the Alaskan nursery business took Walt Mayr.
One of “the last true pioneers” of Alaskan horticulture, Walt Mayr (1914-2009)
Photo: Courtesy of Nancy Fann
By Allen Bush
I’ve started reading the daily obituaries out of necessity rather than curiosity. The Kentucky writer Wendell Berry once said you end-up going to a lot funerals when you live in a small community. I’ve celebrated the passing, this past year, of two friends who lived long, wonderful lives. One was a North Carolina farmer, the other a Kentucky lawyer. It is a privilege to have a friend (in this case, the lawyer) who could laugh in his 95th year and ask, with a twinkle in his eye, “Why don’t we have a little something?” Meaning: Make mine a dry martini. Both wise men departed life on the wings of a dove. And though Phillip Roth said, “Old age isn’t a battle, it’s a massacre,” my friends left a legacy for growing older with grace. There wasn’t the slightest hint that old age was an inconvenience.
Walt Mayr, age ninety-five, passed away on August 10, 2009. I never met Walt. He lived far away in Sutton, Alaska. He was a skilled nurseryman who needed cultural questions answered when he first phoned me at Jelitto Perennial Seeds in Louisville, Kentucky.
We used to talk once a year and it didn’t take long to understand his genome was hotwired for curiosity. I didn’t have all the answers, but that didn’t matter. Figuring-out the best soil chemistry for growing plants is like rolling the dice on the periodic table. The best growers are a mixture of humility and doggedness. They work against great odds every year and know the deck is stacked. The most adventurous, and successful, are willing to try a few new plants every year along with their bread and butter inventory. They struggle to figure-out how to grow crops well, but that is one of the exciting parts of the adventure. Rare, indeed, is the grower who can keep the wolves from the door for over fifty years.