Bouquet of the Week: Greetings From The City of Eternal Spring
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, GC Staff Writer Nora Rose Mueller styles a bouquet from the city of Cuernavaca, Mexico– an area known for its incredible greenery and garden culture.
Located just an hour’s drive outside Mexico City, Cuernavaca is known as the “City of Eternal Spring.” All year, the temperature lingers somewhere between 65ºF and 85ºF, never climbing too hot or dipping too cold. It rains almost every night for a discrete, very wet period of fifteen minutes. The deluge arrives all at once in a startling, sudden, nearly biblical downpour, and ends with a similarly precipitous, swift conclusion. Then life resumes again, picking up exactly where it left off– only a little more damp.
As a result, everything that grows is perfectly green: bougainvillea creeps over almost every wall, its papery flowers well-fed and full; trees grow tall and wide; no patch of grass is interrupted by brown spots; and even the smallest landings are crowded with lush, verdant plants. Everything grows with ease and there are almost as many nurseries as there are food shops.
To honor the sheer amount of green Cuernavaca has, I decided to source my bouquet mostly from the garden of family I was staying with, avoiding the use of too many grandiose flowers. I bought only two things for the bouquet at the flower market downtown: the vibrant red gladiolus (a flower one encounters at every turn in central Mexico) and the spiny Bells of Ireland. The shiny goat’s head leaves, branches of tiny limes, yellow florettes, and the single stem of heliconia (better known there as “the toucan flower”) were all gathered from the surrounding yard– and they were hardly missed.
Altogether this bouquet offers a picture of the central Mexico’s flourishing nature, balancing bright, summery colors with fresh greens. The spontaneous shapes of the different plants– the flat, parallel contour of the goat’s head versus the tall, straight silhouette of the gladiolus– likewise evoke the diversity and easy beauty of all that grows in and around Cuernavaca. The city is an endless source of enjoyment for garden lovers, and I hoped my bouquet captured something of the city’s natural spectacle. For a fact, Cuernavaca’s nickname is absolutely no exaggeration.
