RELUCTANT NOVICE FLOWER ARRANGING : All Thumbs : Mr. Ota’s Corsage Class Learns to Tie a Bow, But a Newcomer Just Gets a Case of the Titters
They all laughed when you sat down to learn flower arranging.
Not overt belly-laughs, but tiny titters, circulating like so many aphids in a Ventura College classroom. Around the room sat two dozen aspiring arranging women.
The room was cool, and stood hard by the college greenhouse. The women, 20ish to 60ish but dexterous to the last one, were there to listen and practice as florist Ron Ota explained the subtleties of corsage construction.
So were you. You, however, had no knowledge of flowers and only limited hand-to-eye coordination. The sure-fingered women around the room on this Tuesday night were on their fourth installment of a six-session course. Hence the titters, which would multiply as the evening progressed.
“Tonight, we’re going to do corsages,” said Ota, a compact man with a curly perm and mustache who spends most of his time running the Flower Power Florist shop on North Las Posas Road in Camarillo. “But to do corsages, you have to know bows, so we’re going to start with bows. Take 10 of the wires, please.”
The wires--24-inch sections of green metal--came around, and everyone took a share.
“Number 24 Wire,” scribbled Renee Clark of Ventura in her notebook. She had come on the recommendation of a friend, and because her son has a prom coming up. Soon she and the rest were wrestling with short sections of green floral tape, trying to wrap them delicately around their wires.
“It’s something that they’ve always wanted to do but they’ve never done,” Ota said later about his students.
Over the length of the course, they were scheduled to learn about vase arrangements, corsages and centerpieces, among other things. Maybe because of this countryside’s agricultural character, Ota said, flower-friendliness seems to run high in Ventura County.
“Here, a lot of people grow stuff in their yards,” he said, “and they want to use some of the stuff that they grow, rather than just cutting the flowers and dropping them in a vase.”
Ota, a florist since 1964, said he started teaching a single course in 1982, “and I’d have to really fight to get 15 or 20 people. Now I get 30 or 40.”
He offers courses occasionally through community services programs at Oxnard and Ventura colleges, as well as the county public school system, usually charging $35 per six-session course, plus $6 to $12 weekly for materials.
“He has a really good reputation,” said Renee Clark.
“This is the class in the area,” said Terri Campbell of Ojai. “Everyone knows that this is the class to take.”
In fact, it may be the only one there is. Employees at six different florist’s shops around the county knew of no flower-arranging courses outside those Ota offers.
Ota started an advanced course at Oxnard College today, and is tentatively scheduled to lead a beginner’s class in the community services division of Oxnard College starting June 21. Registration opens after release of the summer schedule next month.
So this was a rare and valuable experience, all this tugging, twisting and tying. And eventually, there were even roses and some white flowers with floppy petals, which you were informed, were cymbidiums.
“I’m flunking bow,” muttered a pessimist across the room.
“This is supposed to be a stress-free class,” complained another.
“My hand doesn’t like doing that,” said Clark after a few minutes of ribbon work. But by then her hands were dancing that same mysterious little dance that Ota’s had when he demonstrated in front of the room.
Your hands, accustomed to tasks no more demanding than the feeding of parking meters, were less certain. Adding a ribbon to this equation only made matters more difficult.
Terri Campbell, a back-yard gardener who had driven down from Ojai for the course, looked on with alarm.
“He’ll come around and help us,” she said gently. “It looks pretty complicated, but. . . . “
But nothing. It was complicated. And most of the others had already spent a fair amount of time in the company of flowers. When Ota had asked for a show of hands earlier in the course, some had even expressed interest in floristry as a line of work.
There were others who had hidden advantages. Lorraine Yzquierdo of Carpinteria and Betty Hewitt of Ventura both sculpted their flowers with precision and grace--then confessed that by day they do detail work for a manufacturer of surgical implants in Goleta. Dexterity was their business.
And dexterity, as the two-hour class neared its conclusion, was increasingly elusive. When the instructor made his final rounds, you raised a gnarled wad of ribbon and flower.
“No,” said Ota. “No, no, no.” And in 20 seconds he had stripped down and rebuilt the wad into something very like a corsage. He didn’t do this to any of the others.
“Well,” said Carolee Tibbitts of Ojai, as classmates filed past to preserve their corsages in plastic containers, “at least now you can tie a good bow.”
The evening could have ended there, on an optimistic note. But then Terri Campbell, who had been paying closer attention, had to interrupt.
“No,” she said. “He cannot tie a good bow.”
This week’s Reluctant Novice is Christopher Reynolds .... Is there something you’ve always wanted to try? Let the Reluctant Novice try it for you. Send your ideas to Ventura County Life, 5200 Valentine Road, Ventura 93003.
