Tips for Finding Floral Inspiration Beyond Your Front Door
I sit here writing this at the end of October, bracing myself for the coldest half of the year in Northeast Ohio.
Once the autumn leaves are on the ground, it’s challenging to find inspiration across the beige–soon to be white–landscape. And of course, like most of us sitting inside for the last two years, I find myself daydreaming of travel.
Nothing inspires me more than seeing the flora of a new landscape, which does not have to be beyond state lines or country borders.
It’s exciting to learn where the flowers we work with daily grow naturally in the wild. And no more exciting than when we stumble upon them on a trip to a new place or successfully grow them ourselves.
Recently, on a trip to southern California, I was overwhelmed by the amount of statice growing along the coastline in Los Angeles and the Elephant Bush thriving in San Diego.
On a trip to South Africa in 2018, I could not believe I had the luxury of seeing Protea growing in the wild. When we have Protea in the flower shop, everyone knows it’s rare, exotic, and a treat to have available in North America. I had the privilege to see it growing straight out of the ground!
Visiting a friend in Ireland a few years back, we hiked through a field of different kinds of heather, now one of my favorite flowers. I did not know what heather looked like before that visit, and often when we get heather in the shop, it looks very different from how it grows naturally.
Because of our zone, Northeast Ohio is not home to as many flowers as some other hardiness zones (I’m looking at you, tropicals).
But when teaching workshops, I am more intentional about sharing where the flowers and greenery we are using come from. And it gets us all excited to see more of the world through the flowers and greenery that grow there, wherever “there” may be.
The next time you are visiting a relative out of state or a friend in another country, pay attention to what is growing around you as you would people-watch in a new city.
Be ready and excited to share a new flower with colleagues and customers, or see how arrangements of local flowers look in a flower shop in a completely different zone from yours.
Ultimately, I appreciate seasons and am inspired by what I see through my windows every day—just as much as what is beyond my front door. I do my best to jot down a poem each season, as each one feels new despite the cyclical repetition each year.
While I brace for the next six months, I’m reminded of the beauty of last year’s season, which fills me with more hope, maybe even wonder of what is ahead:
March is like waiting on a birth—as soon as it starts greening it starts growing and does not stop until the trees fill with leaves that puff and pillow like a mushroom cloud that comes right up to the window and fills me up with smoke,
that I inhale, exhale, inhale until I am pink in April and green in May, a balloon floating in a damp jungle held up by branches so full I will get stuck and never fall through.
Cradled in the treetops, looking out through windows between the leaves until I fall with them in November.
