WEDDING FLOWERS

This past weekend we arranged flowers for our friend's country wedding in Massie, Ont.  A large order of 30 bouquets, 4 boutonnieres, 2 corsages, wedding cake flowers and bridal head piece was placed.  Luckily local wildflowers and foliage were requested amongst cut blooms (from our favourite flower shops at Ave & Dav) to help with the volume and to keep the order affordable.  

Last year I read The Surprising Life of Constance Spry an inspiring biography of a woman who moved from social reformer and teacher in her early years to society floral designer and best seller author in middle age.  I always think of her innovative arrangements when creating my own.  Constance has been my guiding light; taught me the significance to the art of living beautifully and that it can be done on the cheap.  Artists have always been resourceful in poverty, elevating themselves above their social class with an eye for good taste and the time do it themselves.

I pulled the following quote from the Design Museum in London which exhibited the retrospective Constance Spry : A Millionare for a Few Pence in 2004.  The exhibition was considered controversial in the design community and was deemed unworthy by James Dyson, the museum's chairman, who submitted his resignation in protest.  

In an era when millions of people were decorating their homes to their own taste for the first time, Constance Spry helped them to do so with flair and for very little money. Believing that everyone had the right to beautify their home and that the means of doing so could be found in woods, hedgerows, vegetable patches or scraps of wasteland, Spry popularised her democratising and essentially bohemian style of home-making by dispensing no-nonsense advise in books, articles and radio broadcasts all over the world. “I do feel strongly,” she once wrote, “that flowers should be a means of self-expression for everyone.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

A bit of poor planning left us with a smoker's room at the Knights Inn Motel in which to arrange the flowers.  The seedy decor and stale smells evoked highway murders, misguided one nighters and booze-laden lonely evenings.  It turns out however, that a couple of crafting ladies can trash a joint just as well as any rounder...we did clean most of it up.