The Art of Arranging : For Amateurs or the Career-Oriented, Classes in Flower Design Are in Full Bloom
It’s the opening night for Gary Mello’s flower-arranging class and it’s standing room only. Students--at tables or lounging on kitchen countertops in a home economics classroom at the Community Education South Bay Adult School--quickly discover that they’ve arrived at the night school equivalent of “Let’s Make a Deal.”
Right off, Mello says there will be a weekly contest--with the student whose floral design is judged best winning the instructor’s arrangement. Finishing second or third is like choosing the “zonk” prize lurking behind the wrong curtain. “Those who come in second and third get to stay and clean up the room,” Mello jokes.
When one student responds in kind that the competition will produce “too much stress,” Mello points out that 10 stress-laden female aerospace engineers from a nearby defense contractor enrolled in his class last semester as therapy.
Not that arranging flowers or even buying them is automatically a stress-reducing activity.
“You have to know what you’re buying. People will gladly sell you something dead,” Mello warns.
Though the class is designed for amateurs, a handful of students considering careers as floral arrangers have enrolled. And there are as many professional women as housewives in the class, along with a few men.
According to industry observers, such a mix of students is typical as interest in flower arranging has been increasing in the last few years. Like flowers themselves, the classes are springing up in obvious and unexpected places.
“I’d say there is a tremendous increase in the number of opportunities to learn flower arranging,” says Thomas Shaner, executive director of the Society of American Florists, adding that the largest explosion has been in classes offered for amateurs. “Within that number is a wide range as to what you can learn.” Shaner attributes the growing demand for classes to people who want to learn how to make flowers last longer (by using floral preservatives, cutting stems under water and treating stems in special ways). And he suspects that because larger numbers of exotic flowers are now available to American consumers, they want to know how to incorporate these unusual specimens in arrangements.
Suit Class to Needs
Allen Beck, who runs Allen Beck Florist in Newport Beach and is also the national president of the Society of American Florists, points out that there are so many types of classes in flower arranging available that people can choose them with their particular needs in mind.
Beginning through advanced classes are offered by many arboretums, botanical societies, public gardens adult schools, nurseries, flower shops, art centers, garden clubs, university extensions, junior colleges, wholesale flower dealers, craft stores and senior centers. Even the New Otani Hotel provides a free, one-hour demonstration of Japanese flower arranging four times a year, with the next one scheduled May 1.
Other free classes in the Los Angeles area are available at the South Coast Botanic Garden Foundation on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, where classes in creative flower arranging and in Japanese flower design are regularly scheduled. The foundation is nonprofit, and there’s no charge for the instruction, but there is an insurance assessment of $4 and a nominal fee for materials and flowers used in class.
Variety in subject matter taught in classes is similarly expanding. At Miles Randolf, a flower shop in Lake Forest (near Laguna Beach), students can take classes in Oriental design, flower arrangements for table settings, wedding flowers, dried and silk flower arrangements, holiday and Christmas arrangements, arrangements incorporating fruits and vegetables and arrangements using “paints, plaster, texturing and different bizarre objects,” says co-owner Randy Harmer.
Beck, who lectures nationally on flower design and the flower business for American Floral Services, observes that the variety available in classes “is a real soup. Not every class is going to meet everyone’s needs. Some people want it to be an art form or to use it as a hobby. Others want it as a profession. Some classes are serious, others are not. One class might be literally training you to work in the floral industry, the next one could be ikebana (Japanese floral arranging), where they teach more about culture and religion than they do about business.
“You can get whatever you want, which is good. At at the same time, there’s no control on the classes and no state licensing. If people do some research on classes first, they’ll save themselves a lot of time.
Robert Gordon, a professor of horticulture at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, observes that the demand for floral design instruction aimed at professional floral arrangers peaked about 1985. But he says demand for classes geared to amateurs has continued to increase during the last few years.
“You not only have choices in where to take your classes now, you also have choices in what’s going on in the class. People couldn’t have specialized like this 20 years ago,” says Gordon, who also teaches non-university students at his Floral Design Studio in San Luis Obispo. He notes that Cal Poly is the only four-year college in California with a complete program in floral design.
In Japan, students of flower arranging often study far longer than four years, as those enrolled in Yoshio Ikezaki’s beginning ikebana class at UCLA Extension learn. There, Ikezaki informs his listeners that master flower arrangers, such as his wife, Toshiko, typically study their art for a dozen years or more. As Japanese floral art emphasizes the relationship of the flower arrangements to everything around them, Ikezaki traditionally holds the last session of his classes at his home in Glendale, where students can see a design as it would be incorporated into a traditional Japanese environment.
‘A Reflection of Your Heart’
“Flower arrangement is a reflection of your heart and your mind,” he tells the students.
After class, he elaborates that he wants his students “to understand that behind the technicalities, there are things that are more important. . . . It’s difficult in only five meetings to give both the philosophical and the technical parts, but without philosophy, the other doesn’t make sense.”
But it’s not only the Japanese who are offering philosophy with the freesias. Occasionally, you’ll find it in a distinctively American class such as the one given by flower artist Chris Slack at the Los Angeles Center for the Living in West Hollywood. (A volunteer effort, the center offers everything from free nutritional consultations and haircuts to alternative healing therapies for those dealing with life-threatening illnesses.)
Slack’s class is called Flower Appreciation 101 and is slightly metaphysical in nature.
“There’s a spirituality about flowers that most people never experience. Most people know there’s something very special about flowers but they don’t quite get in touch with it,” says the artist, an ex-New York flower shop owner turned free-lance arranger. His art--which he calls “flower sculpture”--was recently spotlighted in the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills, and Slack also teaches privately at the greenhouse of his Los Angeles home.
“To me, flowers have this extremely condensed lifetime that we have the privilege of watching,” he adds. “They’re such a beautiful statement about life. It makes death easier for us to take if you can appreciate the beauty of a flower living and dying.”
Thus, students in Slack’s classes are invited to participate in brief meditations on flowers before actually working with them. Then, rather than copying arrangements, the students are often encouraged to experiment with freestyle designs whether they’re creating nosegays or laying out an assortment of lemons, twigs and leaves on mantles in their homes.
As Slack likes to remind his students: “There is no really right or wrong way to do this. The important thing is to follow your heart.”
