Wednesday Wisdom #5 - The Zinnia

I made this arrangement July 17th, 2019 at World’s End Farm. I was on a flower residency with Sarah Ryhanen. Looking back I see how transformative that experience was, for multiple reasons, and I imagine she will be featured in this newsletter with some regularity. Today I want to discuss one lesson that I learned from her that continues to shape how I think about many forms of artistic creation.

In floral design, we often work from structured, woody greens and flowers to more fragile, dainty, moving blooms. You achieve the basic shape of the arrangement through those first, foundational placements, usually greens, and then layer in focal flowers, and end with what are sometimes called “filler” flowers, but are better thought of as accents.

In one of our flower arranging sessions, Sarah pointed out that the arrangement should be complete any time you finish a level. In other words, you should be able to stop after doing just the greenery and have an attractive arrangement before you even add the focal flowers. To give you an example, here is an image of an earlier version of the same arrangement that I posted above:

As you can see, I hadn’t added any of the pink zinnias yet. But I could have left the arrangement here; its basic shape was in place. Instead, I added just one pink zinnia. It was Sarah who suggested I add two more, to make a total of three, a “zinnia moment” at the base, anchoring the foundation of the arrangement even as the poppies reached dramatically upwards.

While this isn’t the best arrangement to demonstrate the principle, I hope these images help to convey it anyway: We need to come to some sense of completion at each level, before we move on to the next.

In the five years since I attended this residency, I have applied and considered this principle many times - in home renovations, in writing projects, in relationships.

It makes sense. If you stand back from an arrangement, and the foundational pieces don’t look quite right, the arrangement will never recover. The shape has to be right from the beginning. “Focal flowers,” like dahlias or other big bloomers, will not camouflage poor shape and neither will pretty social media photos compensate for a life that is not authentic to your identity.

In my life, I’ve had to rip out much of the foundational greens, and start over. My partner was not aligned, my career stopped challenging me, my religious beliefs were not reflective of my own experience of the divine. No matter what I did, with a foundation like that, I was not going to find peace or self actualize. And so I have been doing the excruciating work of starting over in all areas of my life.

A few years in to this process, things are starting to settle. I have a life partner who is wise, flexible, resilient, funny, generous, and reasonable. The renovations on our home have largely come to an end and we have a space worthy of us. I am knee-deep in study to become a practitioner of Chinese medicine and giving more of my attention to my true vocation.

It’s a difficult truth to acknowledge, but if the foundation is off, starting over is the next right step.