Bouquet of the Week: A Vintage Typewriter Bouquet

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 “Typewriter Bouquet,” a way to incorporate flowers into the home without relying on a vase or other traditional flower vessels.

As Earnest Hemingway once quipped, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” The typewriter is a site of germination and growth: words seed ideas that blossom into stories.

For this week’s Bouquet of the Week feature, I chose a mix of real and paper flowers–several of the keys have been replaced by illustrations of blossoms, as if the typewriter itself were coming alive with the words it was writing.

I was inspired to use the heather after shooting a forthcoming story for Garden Collage in Lüneburger Heide, Germany, which is an area covered with the grass-like flower. As they are not an overly ornate plant, I did not have to worry about burdening the bouquet. The antique paper and grasses maintain a vintage vibe, uniting the fresh flowers and old-fashioned, mechanical lines of the typewriter. Using this vintage typewriter was also poetic because when you send flowers, you send a message— so this is a bouquet that delivers in more ways than one.