Portland Rose Festival Grand Parade float design excursion

BYU IDAHO floral students and faculty get to play before the parade!

In June, for the past three years, BYU Idaho Floral Design students and faculty have travelled to Portland, Oregon, to help do the floral design work on floats for the Grand Floral Parade. It has been a great place to practice the training students receive, and we have been able to perform quite a service as specialized volunteers for the event. If there were no volunteers in Portland, there would be no parade. As it is, there is a small army of help that shows up. This year most of them were Mormon missionaries serving in the Portland Oregon area on a full-time 18 month or two year volunteer mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. There were dozens who showed up to help glue, pin, paint, stick, cut...

There are many other loyal volunteers from the greater Portland community who likewise give time to help make the event beautiful.

One of the rules about the parade floats is that all surfaces must be covered with plant materials. This requires some pretty detailed and creative use of seeds, bark, leaves, fruits--in fact just about anything that has the right texture or color ends up on a float.

These volunteers are covering the letters and surface of a sign with seeds. This sign alone took hours to complete.

Volunteers are detailing these signs for a float supporting the local Hispanic community

¿ What do poppy seeds and popcorn have in common...

with dried pineapple...

and candied mango?

Can you see where they were used? Notice the belly covered with ground dried red peppers.

Many of the volunteer time is spent on scaffolds, here several missionaries are covering leaves.

Volunteers pin fir branch tips onto a foam base. You can see the square container caged and ready to accept flowers in the left center of the photo.

And here is the same float nearly complete.

The dragon is spectacular already,

but look how much a few flowers can add.

These boots are made for walking, but the rose parade calls for ROSES!

and then a little more of the patriotic mix of colors.

Many flowers are placed in water pics to help them last and stay securely on the float.

Here they will give an illusion of waves of water.

This one is almost ready for the judges.

Every stem that is inserted in a cage on a float has to be glued in place, as well as inserted in floral foam. No that is not honey!

Here we are after days of work, we take a quick walk before the parade begins, after the floats have been driven a few miles over the freeway (we have to design for the wind), then we jump in the car and drive more than a dozen hours to get back home to Rexburg that night.

Thanks to the 2010 BYUI design crew, ready to head out.

We also send a team to the Pasadena Rose Parade to help with some of the much larger floats there. That will have to wait for another post...

...and, by the way, the floats we worked on won the top honors two years in a row!!!

A little about our open house at BYU Idaho

The Bridal Bouquet Workshops 2010



One of the most enjoyable parts of our annual spring flower and bridal open house is the bridal bouquet workshop. We have three different workshop levels. Workshop A is for the beginners, and gives the student a chance to make a bouquet in a bouquet holder (lomey, oasis etc.). As it is usually the first time the student has made one, this bouquet will be simple; yet we try to have every bouquet different from the others, so the challenge is to come up with flowers that will open the door to a different look for each bouquet. There are about 20 or so in that workshop.




Workshop B is for those who have completed the first level, and are now challenged to design as a group, using the exact same materials, but each producing a bouquet that is completely different from the rest of the group. Groups usually consist of three students. They have to
agree on all the materials they use--everyone has to use everything, but not necessarily in the same proportion. This makes for a very interesting comparison of design skills and creativity.




Workshop C challenges the advanced students to create a more complex bridal bouquet using some type of armature or highly structural component such as a wire grid, then carry the bouquet around during the open house, and answer questions about the design as our visitors walk through the open house.





The creativity, the variety of materials, and the spontaneity are quite exciting.
More in another post about the open house itself.

thueson shakespeare wedding

On the 10th of April, 2009, I was given the privilege of designing the fresh floral component of a great wedding event. My good friends, the Thuesons, asked me to help with the flowers for their daughter Katelan's wedding. The venue is the new Rexburg Idaho Henry's Fork Stake building.



In the foto above, the booktable, and in the fotos below, there are several views of the backdrop.








The main flowers used for this event are heliconias. I brought them in from Ecuador, Hawaii, and Costa Rica. The pincushion protea (Leucospermum) were from a grower in Ecuador. The orange Anthurium were grown in Trinidad. Following are some fotos of the centerpieces, cake etc.








and here are the bride and groom in front of the buffet piece.



the corner was dark when I was taking this shot, but you can spot the buffet in the corner





there are some fun details in the buffet piece, birds I found in the LA flower market, green cymbidium orchids from the Netherlands, the other cymbidiums are from the student greenhouses at the Cal Poly San Louis Obispo campus--I picked them up while we were on a student field trip there the week before the event. The green dendrobium sprays were from Tailand.


The beehive gingers are a special treat direct from Hawaii. In this large piece you can see the heliconias well too. The tall parrots are from Hawaii, the intermediate heights were from Ecuador, and the shorter ones were from Costa Rica. There is also some Chamaedorea cataractarum palm from Florida, and some boronia, added for fragrance.





Here is the groom's family!


and here is the Thueson immediate family. I missed the larger group picture. They are a great family!


I think that this large piece was the favorite one to do. It was a therapeutic experience, and brought much enjoyment to those who came to the wedding reception.


This was a blast to do, and the whole evening was pleasant. In the background, and around the room, I also placed a dozen live palm trees for added atmosphere. There were four each of Spindle, Majesty, and King palms.

Laurel Coburn Wedding Event

Laurel's  Wedding   8 November, 2008

The Headwater Grill at Teton Springs Resort near Victor, IDaho was the site of a wedding event I recently helped with.  Laurel Coburn's parents have been friends for decades, and we have also been neighbors through the years in Logan, Utah, and Salem, Idaho.  It was a great thrill to help by providing and designing flowers for Laurel's wedding event in such a lovely place.

This is the Headwater Grill at Teton Springs in November of 2008.  You can check out the property web site by clicking here.  The staff and management folks were great to work with, and made the event quite pleasant.  It was a cool, but perfect evening, with a recent light rain that made everything look so clean, yet providing fresh snow in the nearby mountains.  This venue is located in Pierre's Hole on the west side of the mountain pass in the Teton Range. Jackson is on the east side about a thin half hour drive away in good weather.  If you are ever in Victor, you should stop at the Emporium and grab a huckleberry ice cream cone, shake or malt.

This is the entrance to the Grill, and the reception.

The flower girls were sure cute, even though a little tired of waiting for the bride to come down the stairs so they could do their job.


A contemplative moment for the bride, just after the "yes" and right before the photo session.

Both the bride and the groom had several family members there to support them.  What a great family!

Enjoy a quick view of the grand entrance of the bride...

This was a very pleasant event.  I used Black Magic roses from Ecuador, mixed with "new love" gypsophylla and dozens of mixed greens, some traditional foliage like Gaultheria (salal) Myrtus communis (myrtle), and some more unusual things, such as aspidistra 'milky way,' pistachio foliage, Australian tree ferns, Leucodendron 'Jester' and mosses.  The request was for a "traditional, cabin look," so the bridal bouquet consisted of two dozen Black Magic roses, with clusters of gypsophylla wound and layered in a spiral around the sides of the hand-tied bouquet.  I used a bright silver woven ribbon treatment over a handle satinized with black "tux" ribbon from Lion Ribbon.  Smaller bouquets constructed to match the Bridal bouquet were used for the four bridesmaids.  Corsages and bouts were black magic roses with pistachio foliage and sprigs of Irish moss, bound with silver boullion from Smithers Oasis.  The tables were decorated with round nosegays of the same roses, with Dutch Pico fronds (a small-leaved chamaedorea), and scattered rose petals.  I brought in the exotic greens from the Aalsmeer market, which means that they came from Australia, flew to the Netherlands, and flew to Idaho all in a very short time.  Thanks to my great friends in Holland and Miami for providing such fine product.  

Happy Roses waking up in Idaho

I brought some rainbow roses® in for our spring flower and bridal show in March, and since then have had many people ask about them. There are all kinds of rumors bouncing around the globe about how they are made, or grown, or magically coloured, so I thought I could post just a little information for my friends here. I will include a link to a great explanation that J Schwanke wrote in an article on his uBloom® page:

The Happy Colors of Rainbow Roses!
uBloom - Friday, 03 October 2008

© uBloom

You can check it out, and also learn more about the floral industry from our friends at uBloom

There is quite a bit of information as well if you go to the happy roses site where the original product development is described. Peter van de Werken is the owner of Riverflowers® and the happy flower concept. Here are a couple of links that are very interesting to look upon:

http://www.riverflowers.nl/

http://www.fjzandbergen.nl/
then click on the link "noviteiten" for a nice gallery of the happy rose colour choices

http://www.happy-roses.com/
the new web site

there is a very interesting video to watch, but you will have to brush up on your Dutch to understand most of it. If you google rainbow roses, or happy roses, you can see video clips from all over the world. It is quite educational.
The two photos I have placed here are bouncing all over the web, so it is hard to give appropriate credit to the original photographers. Please forgive.

People have been colouring flowers for ages, with myriad products that could enter through the stem, or be painted on the petals. There are paints, dips, and dyes, all creating illusions of colour that nature could not seem to come up with on her own. And sometimes when you are in a pinch, you need to alter the colour, blending an odd flower here or there with something that just would not match up otherwise. I love to guild the edges of a poinsettia or a fresh or artificial wreath with gold colortool® at Christmas time. Learning to air brush a rose with colortool® from Design Master is something every florist should know how to do well. It is not just spray painting, but rather a technique of brushing the paint through the air onto the petals with a very light touch.

Stem dye can be kind of messy, but who can not recall a stalk of celery in food coloring from a science class in grade school? It was a quintessential thrill to watch the dye as it gathered in the veins of the stem and leaf. We seem to want something that nature does not provide. It is a thrilling pursuit to try to find the perfect blue rose, or a black rose, or a chocolate orchid.
photo © getty images
I mentioned Florigene® dianthus in a blog post about Amy and Benj's wedding a while back. This is another way to play with colour in flowers. This company is using genetic modification to bring new colours into the marketplace. Check out the web site:

http://www.florigene.com/

Since 1986 the company has tried to create a blue rose. The result so far has showered many surprises into the vases of the world. I love the play on purples and lavenders. There seems to be an additional benefit of increased vase life as well. Playing around with the biosynthetic pathway of anthocyanins in the flowers has delivered genetic changes in pigment. With all the interest in phytochemicals that benefit us in our diets, I wonder if some foods could be improved with the same methodology. (maybe that is why Suntory is interested--they are most known for beverage production in Japan) Those dark natural colours seem to deliver more good things at every turn. The Florigene company is based in Melbourne, Australia. They have become involved with Suntory, a Japanese firm, in this pursuit. You put great people together, some of the best names in industry, and you are sure to come up with value and beauty. I love to see the results!

Please enjoy surfing the sites I have mentioned above, and let me know if you see something new out there while you are traveling the web, or the globe.
--br

Bethany and Jonathon wedd

Bethany Kaye Romney and Jonathon Lawrence were married on 14 June, 2008
in the Rexburg LDS Temple

They wanted to join thousand of others this year and be married 8 8 08, but the numbers didn't add up for them; that was too long to wait! But add 6 and 8 and you get 14. That will do.

The sum of the flowers added up nicely too. Beth wanted bright, beautiful whites with natural greens. That meant anything from olives to limes, with mossy undertones. She chose Hydraengeas for her photo shots a couple of days before the wedding--all white mounded giant blooms, and again for the bouquet at the temple, so I hand-tied them--just kept adding them until she was satisfied. This time we minimized the white and used more green The large bouquet was striking and bright in the morning light.


Wedding day for Bethany, our youngest daughter

Beth in her lovely gown, handmade in France

What bright light this couple radiates!

most of the family, minus some of the little ones, just after the temple ceremony

The bouquet from the morning was left in the car--the ultimate oops for this well-trained bride, so I tied another together before the reception. This time I used Rosa 'Limbo' and small white Zantedeschia (callas). It survived the evening at Romney Place, despite the afternoon of very strong winds, and even survived the toss. I placed mixed bouquets on the serving and seating tables, including more Hydraengeas, 'Green Goddess' callas, and some dramatic Eremerus lilies

The bouquet grabbers gather

Beth cuts the cake. Grandson Isaac is quite enthralled with the process while he sips limewater

I suspended the oval shaped cake and stand in a Wilson's weeping birch that grew in a heart shape after it froze back several winters past. It was an unusual way to display a cake and brought many comments. It was covered with about 100 'Limbo' roses I brought in from Ecuador.

Entertainment was provided by "the Brothers of Abraham"
check them out at brothersofabraham.com or buy their "removing the pain" album on itunes
Bethany's brothers, from left: Benjamin 6 string bass & vocals, Abraham, guitar and vocals, and Anthony, drums