From the very beginning of my career in professional floral design, I was a rule breaker. A rebel with a cause, you might say. My floral design instructors collectively chided me along the way for not conforming to the highly-structured, floral-foam-frenzied, rose-laden world of traditional floristry. My style always was and likely always will be unconventional and atypical.

But with all the success in recent years with Love ‘n Fresh, I had forgotten a bit about being a real odd ball. It came flooding back to me though at the Philadelphia Flower Show this week. Over the past couple of years, I’ve taken to entering a floral arrangement for judging at the Show. It’s fun to take on an assigned theme and flesh it out with flowers to see how it holds up against other talented designers’ concepts. I get a serious jolt of nerves and excitement every time I rise before dawn to load the van and go to set up my entry in the massive convention center decked out with billions of blooms.

The theme of the entire Philadelphia Flower Show this year was Brilliant! (a.k.a, all things British). I do adore English gardens (having toured a great many of them) and find my design aesthetic echos them. So I took a leap of faith and entered a new and more challenging category this time that required a larger, more complex display.
The category was called “Welcome” and it was meant to evoke a foyer in a pre-assigned quintessential English home. Throughout the show, there were rotating assigned themes within this specific category, and I chose to enter the one for “Cottswald Cottage”. The design was to be judged from all sides, and the rules required a table with a floral arrangement. Otherwise it was a bit of a free-for-all.

I dreamed up a display that would feel as though the viewer had stepped in the door of the cottage after its owner had just gotten back in from a brisk morning walk among the hills and gardens. There was a sturdy chair with boots, a hat, and a corduroy vest recently discarded. On the table was a stack of mail with international stamps and the key to the front door. A cup of tea and some books sat under the window with the lace curtain. Outside was a spring-time window box full of muscari, primerose, and fragrant stock. There was even a little stone wall with ivy scampering among the crevices. And of course there was a huge pitcher full of beautiful seasonal spring flowers that were surely just plucked from the cottage garden right outside the door. Larkspur, poppies, delphinium, queen anne’s lace, anemones, and ranunculus all nodded happily to visitors. The color scheme was purposefully soft and pastel to echo the pastels of English gardens.

To be honest, I was pretty pleased with myself.
That was, until I got third place.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a sore loser (I swear!). In fact, I haven’t won a blue ribbon yet at the Flower Show, and I’m totally okay with that. I always go look at the blue ribbon winners and try to assess how I could implement some of their techniques (usually it means learning more restraint and reducing the number of flowers I use). I have a lot to learn, and there are so many amazing designers competing there. That’s part of the reason why I love entering a competitive design.

But what was a tab bit upsetting this year was that, while my design was spot-on for the assigned theme, according to the judges’ comments, it was apparently considered too unconventional, particularly the use of the white pitcher as a vessel. The two entries in first and second place were stunning arrangements full of hot-house, long-stem, bright yellow and pink roses and a number of other very brightly hued flowers that would not appear in an English cottage garden. The arrangements themselves were very large and formal, designed in low trays of floral foam. They were perfectly suited for a feast table in an English earl’s castle. But they were not at all suited for a small English cottage foyer. And yet they took the blue and the red ribbons, me thinks, because they followed all the rules of traditional floristry and used familiar elements that the judges were expecting to see.

Well, I’m not about to conform now, so no sense in fussing about it. And, besides, I got the sweetest note from a secret admirer that I found when I was disassembling my display. The note was tucked in under where the third place ribbon was hung. It reads in scrawling capital letters: MANY OF US DISAGREE.
{p.s. – the lighting was so harsh at the Flower Show that many of my photos didn’t turn out so well. The prettier pictures in this post were taken at home.}
{p.p.s. – most of the flowers used in this design were not locally grown, but were from California. It’ll be another six weeks before the larkspur and queen anne’s lace are blooming here.}