Bouquet of the Week: Puppies and Poppies
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 honors the onset of spring with a new concept: Puppies and Poppies.
When I realized that I was going to be curating GC’s Bouquet of Week during the first week of Spring, I knew I had to make it into something special. In previous iterations of this feature, we’ve stuck closely to the concept and styled our bouquets around a theme, whether that be a color, a holiday, a travel inspiration, or a vessel. For the first Bouquet of the Week this Spring, I went with the most powerful tool in the arsenal: puppies.
For our “Puppies and Poppies” feature, I invited staff writer Nora Mueller over to my apartment and had a bunch of puppies delivered through a puppy party service based in Brooklyn– a company that normally rents dogs for childrens’ birthday parties. On the overcast afternoon when the puppies were to be delivered, we made a trip to Sprout Home, my favorite local flower shop, and gathered a big bucket of pink flowers to maintain the alliteration of “puppies”, “poppies”, and “pink”.
After throwing together a quick arrangement, we were delivered a Boston Terrier, a Corgi, a toy Australian Shepard, and a “teddy bear” (a cross breed between a Bichon Frise and a Shih Tzu), the latter of which is pictured above. We let the dogs run around the apartment and frolick amongst the flowers, momentarily pausing from reveling in their cuteness to dissuade them from eating the actual plants. The idea here is that we would bask in the joyous colors and playfulness of two amazingly nourishing aspects of the natural world: animals and plants. This is a lovely way to honor Spring, and the awakening it has come to symbolize.
All of the dogs that were delivered to my home will eventually be adopted, but one of them didn’t yet have a name at the time of our engagement, so we were given the opportunity to choose one. We decided to name the adorable teddy bear “Sprout”, in honor of our Garden Collage children’s section, Lil Sprouts. Every time we held him, we could feel Sprout’s little heart fluttering in his chest, his tiny system coursing with the jilted energy of a hummingbird’s wings. We both adored him from the very first snuggle, so naming him felt like a simultaneous christening of this week’s GC bouquet.
We crowned Sprout with flowers to honor the moment and passed him around when he wasn’t tussling with another puppy, Griddle, who also had an affinity for our bouquet mix of anemone poppies, roses, ranunculus, euphorbia, and more (check out more pictures below). With their insatiable curiosity and active demeanors, the puppies functioned as the perfect counterpoint to the static, unmoving flowers. As such, this week’s bouquet is a mix of frenzied and stoic beauty– elements characteristic not only of Spring, but of the profound sense of renewal that comes with combining the delights we hold most dear.
