How To Turn Supermarket Flowers Into A Show-Stopping Centerpiece
Flowers from the supermarket don't often seem like they have the same level of finesse and vibrancy as their meticulously arranged counterparts from a professional florist -- but they can.
Floral design studio owner Clover Chadwick says that even the more ho-hum bouquets from the grocery store have the potential to transform into stunning centerpieces. As she demonstrates, it requires minimal effort to rearrange those bulky buds into a cohesive, blooming display. It just comes down to following a few simple steps.
Step 1: Start with your biggest, bulkiest flower (ex: hydrangea)
Many supermarket flower bouquets include hydrangeas, so separate these large blooms from the pack and cut the stems so that they rest around the lip of your vase.
Step 2: Add your "branchiest" greens (ex: eucalyptus)
Next, determine which greens have the most branches. "This is going to give you shape, plus stability," Chadwick explains. "Eucalyptus is great because it has lots of little branchy arms."
Step 3: Add leafier greens (ex: lemonleaf)
To tighten up the space and bolster the stability, reach for your leafy stems. "Lemonleaf is the other one you'll see quite commonly used in grocery store bouquets because it's super-bulky, has a great color and it's really durable," Chadwick says.
Step 4: Add the larger, more durable flowers (ex: chrysanthemums and carnations)
Now that you've created your basic shape, it's time to build into it with flowers. Chrysanthemums and carnations take up a decent amount of space and add a needed pop of color to add balance to the arrangement.
Step 5: Add your next-largest flower (ex: lilies)
This piece should be your show-stopper. Place these flowers -- like lilies -- strategically, in areas in which they are easily visible and can truly stand out. "Make sure with lilies that you always remove the pollen," Chadwick instructs. "That will make them last longer."
Step 6: Fill in the holes with your remaining pieces (ex: alstroemeria, roses and gerbera daisies)
Use whatever is left over to fill out the shape of your arrangement -- and be sure to save the most delicate flowers (like gerbera daisies) for last. Flowers with longer stems can also be used to add height as well as layered color.
US flower growers fear bloom is off the hobby
At the National Chrysanthemum Society’s annual show in northern Virginia, a steady stream of visitors discovered an alternative world of mums – blooms of rare size, colour and form. “Wow,” announced one visitor. “Can I get these at Home Depot?” No, sir, you cannot.
The mum show has been a rite of autumn for generations – the sort of small-town subject that would have appealed to Norman Rockwell – but how much longer it can survive is an open question. Exhibition chrysanthemums are not endangered, but the demanding hobby of raising them is under threat as the ranks of fanciers fade away. The blooms range from delicate, threadlike flowers suggesting spreading tentacles of coral, to enormous globes of featherlike petals.
But consider this: the show’s blue-ribbon sweepstakes winner, David Eigenbrode, is 82; Robert Howell, the runner-up, is 84. In a decade or two, the hobby “is either not going to exist or continue to limp along”, said John Capobianco, whose local society in Long Island once boasted 100 members and shows of a thousand blooms. It is now down to 13 members who work hard to exhibit 100 flowers.
“We are afraid, honestly, that growing chrysanthemums for show is going to become a lost art,” said Pat Stockett Johnston, a hobbyist from southern California. “I would be embarrassed to tell you how many chapters we have lost in the past 13 years, perhaps close to 20.”
Johnston, 74, became the national society’s new president during its recent show and annual gathering. The society has approximately 500 members, compared with 2,400 members in the early 1980s, said Galen Goss, the group’s director of management services.
The anxieties of the chrysanthemum world are shared by the remaining active members of other flower and plant societies throughout the US, including those for roses, camellias, daffodils, dahlias and hostas, to name a few.
Traditionally, such local societies would attract members in their 30s who joined to get access to prized varieties, attend monthly meetings, receive growing advice from the old lions, and learn how to groom their flowers for competitive shows. Many societies formed before and after the second world war, when fewer women juggled careers with families, life was slower-paced, distractions fewer and interests simpler.
Apart from the modern career and parenting pressures for millennials, many have moved into cities. They don’t have the land to plant bulbs or cultivate flower beds, and much of their life involves screens.
In the new social universe of the 21st century, plant societies are trying to plug into Facebook and other social media to reach young people, but they recognise that their oldest and most knowledgeable members aren’t comfortable with the likes of Instagram.
Participation in all manner of leagues, clubs and other civically cohesive groups has been declining for years, but what makes the flower society demise more poignant is that expert flower-growing requires a mentor-student relationship that is inherently intergenerational, said Sherry Turkle, the MIT researcher who has written extensively about technology and society.
“Young people are talking so much about nature, conservation, the Earth, and yet I fear that the easiest way to do that is to participate online,” she said. Implicit in such plant societies is a connection not just to the minutiae of nature but to other people’s lives.
“Young people are suffering from not having natural conversations with older people,” Turkle said. “They don’t know how to have empathetic conversations about the arc of human life, because they are not talking to older people.”
Since 2012, a coalition of plant societies has met annually to confront membership woes, with the help of the American Horticultural Society. At the chrysanthemum show, the horticultural society’s executive director, Tom Underwood, and American Dahlia Society activist Harry Rissetto made presentations on ways to revive membership.
“We have a lot of older members and they simply forget” to renew memberships, says Harry Rissetto of the American Dahlia Society. Photograph: Jabin Botsford/Washington Post
In sum, the advice mirrors the counsel any legacy enterprise must hear these days to survive: have a dynamic website full of great content, exploit social media and create the infrastructure for online transactions. “But the bottom line,” Underwood said, “is the focus on people and relationships.”
One tactic is to send people who don’t renew their membership a letter asking them if they meant to drop it, Rissetto said. “We have a lot of older members and they simply forget.”
In the past two years, two chrysanthemum clubs have been created, one in Raleigh, North Carolina, the second in the Bay Area of California. The former was established by Joan Matthews, a 65-year-old retired teacher who says effective recruiting can be done at garden-related events and venues. The North Carolina State Fair was one such place; another was her garden in downtown Raleigh. “When they saw how they looked in my yard, they said they wanted to grow them,” she said.
Jeff MacDonald, 59, started the Bay Area chapter in 2013 by handwriting letters to people who were lapsed members of the national society in his area. He met five of them at a restaurant and, after reviving the club, they recruited more at a garden centre. Most of the current 49 members are Asian – exhibition mums have deep roots in China and Japan.
Howell, runner-up at the chrysanthemum show and a longtime grower, could be found a week before the show in his Beltsville, Maryland, backyard with protege Polo Diaz, who, at 49, is the youngest member of the Potomac Chrysanthemum Society. Diaz is a landscaper who noticed Howell’s blooms while working in the neighbourhood four years ago. When Diaz asked about them, the octogenarian took the younger man under his wing, giving him cuttings to pot up in the spring and grow through the summer.
Another encouraging presence at the show were the prizewinning blooms grown by middle school students from Canton, North Carolina, whose entries were driven to Fairfax by their (now retired) biotechnology teacher, David Curtis. The problem is that once the students hit high school, horticulture isn’t offered, he said.
Capobianco, who was standing nearby, said his hope is that if teenagers are introduced to growing flowers, they will return to them later in life after the distractions of young adulthood. The question is: will there be a local or national society for them to return to?
For a while, such fears were put aside as growers and visitors alike savoured the spectacle of the exhibition flower.
In her pep talks to her new members, Matthews tells them: “It’s not just about what you get but what you give. You’re giving these plants the ability to take your breath away, the ability to exist.”
Breathless admiration has been the reaction since the first show in the United States. “It was in 1884 in Massachusetts,” Howell said. “I wasn’t there.”
30% less flowers at Kaas Pathar this year
If you wanted to see the rainbow of blossoms at Satara's Kaas plateau, then you would have to be disappointed this year. Scanty rainfall and delayedmonsoon led to less flowers blooming at the plateau, also known as Kaas Pathar, a major tourist attraction. While the flowering usually starts in August, this year it prolonged to September second week.
Kaas pathar, declared as a World Natural Heritage Site, has over 850 varieties of flowers blooming every monsoon.
Speaking with iamin about the plateau, A Patil, Range Forest Officer, Satara ForestDivision said, "The Kaas stretches at over 1,000 acres and has some beautiful variety of flowers including Vayutara, Kaasa, Kumudini which are major tourist attractions. There is a footfall of thousands each year, starting from August to mid-October".
Suraj Patil, 28, who has been visiting Kaas Plateau for the past few years said: "I go to this place specially for the water lilies, but during August there was no flowering. This is something I witnessed for the first time in the last four years of my visit".
According to the forest department, there was reduced visitor footfall this year because of the delay in the flowering. "The monsoon begins by July and flowering starts in August normally. This year, it was delayed and hence the flowering occurred in September. The intermittent rains also affected the flowering and damaged the crops. This resulted in almost 30% decrease in flowering this year, much less than previous years. Also, as October heat was also high, the flower beds dried by mid-October, keeping only a 15 day window for tourists to enjoy the beauty of the flowers," added Patil.
Most of the tourists and nature lovers waited for the blooming of Karvi, which happens every seven years, but in vain. "Very few Karvi flowers could bloom this year," Patil said. Karvy is a rare purple - blue flower found in the Kaas plateau region of Western Ghats.
Not even skin deep : City of faux flowers
PESHAWAR:
Artificial flower-bearing plants made of cloth and other synthetic material, make Peshawar instantly beautiful. However, they do not help build an ecologically sustainable environment in the city. Horticulturists criticised the new beautification plan when it comes to minimising pollution.
The K-P government approved an Uplift and Beautification Programme, which includes various projects to make the city look more beautiful and appealing to locals and tourists.
CM Pervez Khattak reportedly said Peshawar was known as the city of flowers. Khattak intends to restore the city to its former glory at all costs. Beautification projects were initiated in 2014 with roadsides, flyovers and parks being the primary focus for the administration.
Pots containing artificial plants and flowers were placed in iron frames that were installed along the flyovers. Locals admired view while driving along the flyover until pollution and dirt diminished their beauty. “This is when we discovered that the plants were not natural. They were just showpieces to make the city look better,” said a local. He added Peshawar was known as the city of flowers, not artificial ones.
An official of Peshawar Development Authority Ikramullah, who supervised the project, said K-P was not the first province to make use of this beautification tactic. “This has been carried out in the federal capital, Rawalpindi and Lahore,” he added. Such artificial plants with flowers have been put on display through metro routes in Rawalpindi and Lahore. “From a budgeting point-of-view, this is a cost-friendly solution to the matter at hand,” said Ikramullah. He pointed out that natural ornamental plants along the flyover wall were difficult to maintain at such an altitude. “We used natural plants in locations where maintenance will not be an issue for the administration.”
Another official privy to the matter reported horticulturists were not consulted prior to starting the project. “If they had been consulted, the city could look more beautiful and be environment friendly,” he said. Professor of horticulture and ornamental plant expert Dr Imran Ahmad, said the beautification provides no benefit to city dwellers or tourists. “Projects should be designed according to the environmental conditions and requirements of the city concerned,” he said.
“Peshawar cannot afford plants made of cloth. The polluted air within the city needs maximum amounts of plants and trees to absorb the poisonous gases emitted by vehicles,” added Ahmad, explaining the gaps in the initiative. The expert also commented on the administration’s reasons for not using ornamental plants. “In this age of technology, it is a lame excuse that flowers and plants cannot be watered at high altitudes,” said Ahmad. He stressed there are a number of irrigation systems which can be used for this purpose.
Ahmad described a number of ornamental plants which survive and thrive on very little water. Thus, the maintenance costs and efforts for the administration will be much lower than the current venture. He suggested that the government would benefit from a separate nursery to maintain and propagate specific plants for the city.
Look At The Beautiful Flowers That Suddenly Grew In One Of The Driest Places On Earth
We can thank El Niño for the beautiful display in Chile's Atacama Desert.
Looking at pictures of Chile's Atacama Desert right now, you would never know it's one of the driest places on the planet. Normally the landscape is parched and arid. But this year it's covered in flowers—mauves, reds, yellows, whites—creating a stunning and unusual spectacle.
Heavy rains prepared the ground back in March. The Atacama region saw almost an inch of rain in one day—the equivalent of 14 years of rain in 24 hours.
"This year has been particularly special, because the amount of rainfall has made this perhaps the most spectacular of the past 40 or 50 years," Raul Cespedes, a desert scientist at the University of Atacama, told AFP.
According to AFP, the flowers include violet-and-white Chilean bell flowers, countryside sighs (Nolana paradoxa), red lion claws (Bomarea ovallei), and yellow Rhodophiala rhodolirion. Because of the intensity of the storms, there were two flowerings: in the winter and now again in the Chilean spring.
"Two flowerings a year is very unusual in the most arid desert in the world, and that's something we've been able to enjoy this spring, along with people from all over the world. There's a lot of interest in seeing it," Daniel Diaz, director of the National Tourism Service in Atacama, told AFP.
Meteorologists blame El Niño for the extreme rainfall in Atacama and warn of worse to come as that weather pattern intensifies. But for now, the event is a boon for tourism and a something to marvel at: flowers where flowers don't normally grow.
