Bouquet of the Week: A Novel Idea

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 Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There.

The last time I attempted National Novel Writing Month, I was in the seventh grade. I can’t recall the specifics of my story and I suspect that is for the best. I am sure it exists somewhere, saved on a floppy disk with a carefully printed label or scrawled in the pages of a mostly empty composition notebook, waiting to be rediscovered and cringed over.

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, takes place in November and invites aspiring authors to complete 50,000 words (about the length of a novel) over the course of thirty days. This equals out to about 1,700 words a day, which always seems reasonable mid-October but becomes impossibly long the moment November begins. I told myself this year I would finally accomplish what my twelve year old self could not.

I am currently hovering at around 500 words.

Flowers, of course, are a popular source of inspiration for writers. For my Bouquet of the Week, I decided to design an arrangement that might galvanize me to–if not catch up–at least make a ritual of adding a little bit on each day. For inspiration, I drew on a text I have always found entertaining and which quite literally brings flowers to life: Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There.

In Chapter 2 of Through the Looking Glass, Alice happens upon a field of flowers and laments, “O Tiger-lily…I wish you could talk,” only to be startled by the Tiger-lily curtly replying, “We can talk…when there’s anybody worth talking to.”

The tiger lily seemed appropriately autumnal in hue, and I selected complementary flowers that similarly evoked the colors of fall. I maintained a very vivid palette with different textures, leaving me with a slightly eccentric bouquet, appropriate for the absurdity of Carroll’s tale.