Bouquet of the Week: May The Florist Be With You

As part of our recurring Bouquet of the Week series, Garden Collage continues to present a weekly inspirational bouquet that incorporates intriguing new elements into the traditional practice of flower arranging. This week, Garden Collage styles a bouquet in honor of science-fiction–its alien worlds and the plants we imagine might grow there.

Growing up, a good number of my Saturday mornings were spent watching the 1951 classic The Day The Earth Stood Still on Laserdisc (a forgotten technology from a futuristic past). That the effects were a bit clumsy and the costumes were sewn from bolts of shiny fabric was unimportant: I loved the adventure and the tragedy, accompanied by a thunderous, eerie soundtrack, unraveling in black and white. I loved the distant worlds the film imagined– however impartial and pulpy, it spoke to the wondrous, infinite potential of space.

Those early viewings fostered a deep love of science fiction, one that was sealed by many hours spent fighting imagined clone armies with Freeze Pop lightsabers or opening my flip phone when it rang in the style of a Star Trek communicator (which resulted in many broken flip phones).

With the recently renewed enthusiasm for Star Wars and Star Trek, I decided to craft a “science-fiction inspired bouquet”, one that would honor and evoke the splendor of the alien worlds that I found so enchanting in my childhood (and that I continue to enjoy today).

In creating my bouquet, I chose plants and flowers that looked as though they could grow on an alien planet– individually each feels strange and unfamiliar, but together they cooperate, as if plucked from the same distant ecosystem. (See the protea, above.)

As a counterpart to their bright, varied hues, I chose a bold vase in a solid color, one that could easily have been borrowed from Captain Kirk’s quarters on the Enterprise— futuristic by way of the 1960s. Though the plants are unfamiliar and unusually shaped, they do not look out of place on a wood table or in a rustic home. Despite seeming to hail from a far flung future or galaxy far, far away, these flowers remind us of the fantastic and extraordinary around us on the planet we call home.