Edges Wild
The Origins of a Design Concept or Artist and Fairies: Co-Conspirators
‘Where did you get this idea?’ is a question I’m often tempted to answer “fairies,” because sometimes I suspect that my mind is run by a clan of sprites. Every design concept I’ve ever executed seems to have originated in a committee meeting--that I did not call--in the library conference room of my brain, where, upon hearing a few keywords like “masculine, moody, and autumnal,” my underlying aesthetic sensibilities, curiosities, nostalgia, things I have recently read, vignettes from Wes Anderson films, Oxford American articles, et. al. animate, convene, and then pull dusty volumes off shelves, jot down half poems, call out snippets of histories, and recite more-or-less correctly remembered scientific factoids, which coalesce into a design concept shimmering with potential. The lingering question being “what if you tried...” or “what about this?”
Which is how I end up driving out to the Katy Prairie Indiangrass Preserve to observe the tiny butterflies flitting along the tops of dewberry brambles, or fall down a Google rabbit hole of 1970s outdoor sportsman magazine covers, or visit the a local antique shop’s ten- point-buck corner before ever logging into Curate and dropping words and images into a proposal template.
It’s also how a “dark and moody, burgundy November wedding” inquiry becomes a proposal pitching a “woodsy, Field & Stream-inspired ceremony and eclectic hunter’s-lodge- meets-meadow reception.” Which translates into deliverables like cloches filled with twigs, preserved butterflies, blackberries, and Darcey Bussells blown all the way open, styled on the head table along with antlers, stacks of old field guides, and a vintage moss green rotary telephone.
Fairies feel like the most fitting analogy for my internal bursts of inspiration if only because the legend of impish preternatural forces isn’t monolithic, but rather a collective of folk tales from disparate sources. Similarly, the ideas I bring to the development of a bespoke floral event are never single-origin. They’re interdisciplinary and sometimes wildly unexpected, I think because I identify as an artist first and a florist second. I think the most important thing a florist can do to arrive at unparalleled, brand-integrous design is to take a page out of the old artist’s book and indulge pre-existing interests up front, finding the contextual or thematic boundaries as she goes.
Here’s an example of what I mean. A planner friend once tapped me for a wedding at the Houston Museum of Natural Science in the paleontology hall, for which the couple wanted a “modern prehistoric” vibe. I sometimes joke that my favorite flower is a fern, so I immediately envisaged woodwardia and Jurassic-looking cycads anchoring the floral design. Then my friend added “Oh, also the bride is super into carnivorous plants.”
So I got out a notebook and started free-associating. I recalled my childhood rambles through North Carolina’s swampy Piedmont forests--Venus flytrap country--only to discover through some quick research that the part of East Texas where I now live is actually the tail end of what used to be a huge contiguous pine forest of an ecological piece with the Appalachian foothills, and that thus Venus fly traps were not only growable locally, but could be sourced at my neighborhood nursery. I shrieked, then got up and went to the nursery.
Also, the groom’s last name was Poe, and he had expressed interest in incorporating some kind of subtle nod to Edgar Allan himself in the overall event design. As I workshopped how to organically weave a macabre literary reference in with subtropical botanicals and an artifact-centric venue, I suddenly remembered past chats with a friend studying paleontology at the graduate level and her fascination with the bones of civilization. Then it hit me. I hopped on Etsy and found a taxidermist who purveyed raven skulls. I bought two.
Finally, I went down to the museum itself and walked slowly through the paleontology exhibit, scrutinizing fossils, staring up at massive dinosaur skeletons, noting the hues of brown, cream, black and purple-blue that seemed to run through the whole space, dark and reverent under high-flung track lights. I meandered out into the adjoining three-story glass conservatory with its simulated tropical rainforest habitat built around a 50-foot waterfall, where huge monstera plants dangled their ancient roots over rock lips, and epiphytic orchids hung from tree branches. I took notes on the spatial composition of these plants, their colors, the gradations of green.
When wedding week came, I created an undulating forest-floor ceremony tableau out of potted tropical plants. The cocktail table accents and centerpieces I built as self-contained rainforest microcosms using tropical blooms, ancient-form-following ferns, and yes, tiny, strange carnivorous plants, all arranged inside of glass and clear acrylic boxes. Museums inside a museum. The bride’s bouquet featured bleached skeleton leaves and fern shoots and lady slipper orchids, and the raven skulls went on the head table.
I love this process. My habit is to always carve out time to explore--if not the actual venue-- at least some environment that represents the effect I’m trying to achieve. I love to ask, ‘what’s going on ambiently? What makes sense in context?’
Years before the advent of Edges Wild, during a seaside walk, I made my little sister a head wreath out of washed up carrageen moss and bladder wrack, complete with a live decorator crab that popped up out of a handful of our beachcombed seaweed and chilled in the salty circlet like a focal flower for a few minutes before we released him back into the dunes. I think the cool kids these days call that “location-specific design.” But that’s the level of immersion I’m always aspiring to, and I find when I commit to it, and not only dig deep in my memory archives but also leave my studio in search of novel perspectives and sensory experiences every time I get a new inquiry, inspiration shows up in droves.
If that all sounds self-indulgent, it totally is. Floristry just happens to be at the center of the heavily overlapping Venn diagram of a bunch of things I already love (the woods, botany, naturalist literature, detailed craftsmanship, independent manual labor, logistics, project management, color theory, anthropology), and I’m milking that fact for all its worth. But if we’re not out there having the time of our lives doing this work, what are we even doing?
My work philosophy is just my life philosophy recycled: poet Mary Oliver’s un-improvable “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” My two favorite places to go for step one are the written word and nature preserves. Which is probably obvious at this point. And it might be a little woo-woo, but I feel like consulting them actually improves my design capability. Because good writing is all about making interesting connections between ideas, tinkering with syntax or the parts of speech. And event design, in the same vein, is about playing with the syntax of a physical room or outdoor environment, highlighting surprising and delightful relationships between seemingly disparate forces, both biotic and abiotic. Pushing boundaries. Sketching out installation renderings just because the upper bound is the amount of lead in the pencil, and I’m unlikely to exhaust that. Exploring the possible while I can.
I like to dream big and broad and then work backwards to the realistic options. So when I start to plan a floral collection in earnest (when I sit down to write out the proposal) I employ the “cutting room floor” to catch compositional flotsam and jetsam. I keep Pinterest boards, sketchbooks, and a Google-drive-hosted, Michael-Scott-inspired “Good Ideas Folder” handy to keep track of things I’d like to return to that either compete with the main concept, or prove too much of a stretch to shoehorn into the project at hand. Which helps me niche down so I can move toward simplicity.
Because simplicity after complexity is the key to great execution. As a maximalist, this is my continual growing edge.
In a radio interview I once heard, teacher Marabai Bush tells the story of introducing the practice of mindfulness to a class of teenagers by giving them each a leaf, and having them study it without speaking for five full minutes. At the end of the silence, a student in the back row, who Bush suspected was most resistant to the exercise, reportedly raised his hand and said “I love my leaf.”
All my best creations begin with an “I love my leaf” moment. Tracing the edges of a decided-upon source (often the unexpected one, at the cost of others), and then finding a way to feature it prominently in the work. My aspiration is always to draw the most over-it of wedding guests into a moment of wonder, no matter how brief.
I love starting there, and I love ending there. On of my favorite parts of the florist life has been discovering that when I take a pet passion, either of my own or a client’s, and let it run around in my mind, or visit the places in which it usually lives, and really look and look and look, I start to see things I didn’t immediately think of, which without fail sparks a creative chain reaction that deepens into affection for the source material, the place, the people involved. Then the possibilities start flitting in earnest around the dewberry brambles of my mind, and I inevitably fall head over heels in love with the emerging vision.
Hannah Lowery is a botany nerd and lifetime artist who is forever exploring the world through attention-paying and creative experimentation. She brings years of study in writing, painting, drawing, dance and design (with their collective insight into storytelling, color, texture, shape and movement) to bear on her current medium and muse: floristry.
Hannah’s aesthetic sensibilities are a twinge left of center, and her working mantra, with thanks to singer-songwriters Over The Rhine, is “against the grain and leave the edges wild.” She and her assistant Abbey are constantly building out the studio on this aspiration, and are all-in on providing an alternative fine-art floral experience to fellow humans (in their hometown market of Houston, TX and beyond) who are on the lookout for something different.