ORANGE : Working to Make a Float Flower

By the time it rolls down Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, Rotary International’s Rose Bowl float will have been touched by the hands of 1,500 volunteers.

The first 25 of them have already started the essential but laborious task of cutting dried flowers.

Armed with scissors and fortified with candy bars and coffee, volunteers from the Orange Senior Citizens Community Center on Olive Street were busy all weekend snipping the tiny leaves off thousands of dried burgundy-hued straw flowers.

The blossoms had been sorted earlier into light, medium and dark hues. The clippings will eventually be pulverized in blenders and transported to the float assembly site.

The flowers will become part of the sweater worn by Linus, one of the nine “Peanuts” characters on the Rotary float.

“It’s just like the weaver preparing the cloth,” said Frank Parsons, president of the Orange Rotary Club, as he watched the volunteers. “This is such a precision operation.”

Though the work is tedious, the senior volunteers had their minds on the excitement to follow. “It will be fun this year thinking that we helped with Linus,” volunteer Connie Chestnut said.

The parade committee does not permit any dyed material on floats, so “every conceivable part of the plant” is used to get just the right colors, said Parsons, a retired horticulturist. “They use hundreds of varieties of seeds.”

In the end, the “Peanuts” float will display about 30,000 roses, 10,000 chrysanthemums, tens of thousands of carnations, irises and daisies and about a ton of dry seeds, nuts, rice and flowers, said Larry Crain, owner of Charisma Floats in Pasadena.