A few weeks ago, during the brief spell of warm spring weather, the internet started talking about planting flowers. “Mother’s Day!” I thought to myself. “You must wait until Mother’s Day to plant.” My mother always told me this.
Now, I’m not a “garden club” type of gal, and the closest to flower arranging I ever got growing up was putting a white carnation in a cup of water with blue food coloring to dye the carnation blue. But, accidentally, my feelings about flowers began to change in 2002 when I started to work for architect Michael Graves as his Executive Assistant.
Newly wheelchair-bound, there were many things for Graves to re-learn, and I picked up a lot of lessons myself along the way. We spent quite a bit of time at his home, which he called The Warehouse. It had been packed up for an accessibility renovation and he needed to put it to rights.
I apparently had a flair for symmetry and got the nod to arrange his collection of Etruscan pots. His encouragement emboldened me. We would tour the grounds of his estate with Lewis, the gardener. Michael was concerned that the allée of Sycamore trees be pollarded at just the right time. (Pollarding is to prune the branches back, forming “knuckles” and growing dense tops.) He was worried about when the wisteria needed to be cut back. For Mother’s Day, the terracotta pots which lined the drive would be filled with red geraniums. “They’ll bloom deep into fall, if you deadhead them regularly” he told me. (Deadheading is to pinch off the dried bloom at the joint, including the stem.)
That year, I began to give my mom terracotta pots of geraniums for Mother’s Day. The flowers were something she missed from her childhood. She loved the way the leaves smelled and spoke of it every time we saw geraniums.
As it turned out, flower arranging would become a part of my job. At first, I would arrange flowers in vases whenever Michael expected guests. Although picking out the flowers, choosing the vase and arranging them sounded easy, it was more difficult than I expected. He did not approve of spending a lot of money on flowers, nor did he like multicolored or multiple species of flowers in the same vase. One flower type, of one color at the proper height in the appropriate vase, arranged beautifully—how hard could it be?
It was, in fact, not too easy, but my arranging seemed to win out over many others who tried. I secretly loved that. When we inspected the house prior to an event, he always said, “You missed your calling, Mary Kate, you missed your calling.” I would always answer him, “No, I didn’t. I do it for you.”
I helped to plan the large summer picnics at The Warehouse. But the 2008 financial crash destroyed any hope of arranging the holiday party at a fancy location. Finding a free location was now part of the plan; that year it was at the office. The next year—armed with the spoils of the local supermarket flower departments, as well as holly, pine boughs and pine cones foraged from Michael’s yard and the park behind his house—we decorated Chancellor Green, the gothic style former library on Princeton Campus. I was amazed how my colleague Dodie and I, along with other valiant volunteers, could transform the octagonal rotunda so beautifully with just those simple things I had gathered.
Around the same time, my aging parents began to rely on my sister and me more. They had always bought three spaces at the Far Hills Race Meeting, a sort of elite New Jersey tailgate party for charity masquerading as a sporting event. It was held in October every year.
Nervous of falling short of my parents’ expectations, I would plan for the Race Meeting for weeks (months) and the night before the event my mom and I would make the flower arrangements together. Usually there were three arrangements: one for the bar; one for the main table; and one for the breakfast/dessert table. Buckets of water that held what we thought would be way too many flowers were soon almost empty and we would panic at the bare spots in our arrangements. So, finally, I would run through the yard (and sometimes other people’s yards) collecting branches of leaves, cabbages, fall plants and flowers to fill in the empty spaces. One year, after dipping into the next day’s brandy, we perhaps got a bit too creative with the branches taken from the rhododendron out front. The poor bush never recovered.
This flower arranging partnership eventually transferred to the Long Beach Island Garden Club, where mom made arrangements for the annual holiday house tour. One of my favorite things to do on weekends was to plan the arrangements with her. We would make up names that connoted the “feeling” of the decorations for the house. One year, we decided upon “Magical Nautical Versailles.” That was my favorite. We’d laugh like fools.
One Saturday morning, while taking my dad to local yard sales, I spotted a book: The Surprising Life of Constance Spry by Sue Shepard. The flower-arranging heroine on the cover caught my attention. It turned out to be the story of the long, circuitous rise of an independant woman whose desires and choices did not mesh with any of the common paths then available to women in the UK in the early 20th Century. From teaching hygiene to the impoverished people of Ireland to creating the arrangements for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Constance Spry made unorthodox choices all along the way. She listened only to herself and I felt a kinship to her. (As a therapist once told me, “For someone who ‘just wants to fit in,’ you certainly make a lot of odd choices.”)
I found a decades-old quote of hers in the introduction of the book:
I want to shout out: “Do what you please, follow your own star; be original if you want to be and don’t if you don’t want to be. Just be natural and gay and light-hearted and pretty and simple and overflowing and general and baroque and bare and austere and stylized and wild and daring and conservative, and learn and learn and learn. Open your minds to every form of beauty.”
Cynical as I was, I loved her, as I’m sure everyone who comes across her does as well. Constance was 43 years old when she opened her shop “Floral Decorations”—she purposefully did not use the word “florist” to accentuate the arrangements’ role as a key part of the decoration, not an afterthought. The odd containers she swapped for vases; the wild flowers; seed pods and weeds she used in the first professional decorations; the paintings she looked to for inspiration—I related to it all.
After a few years, I moved into the place next door to my parents in Barnegat Light, in order to help them continue to live at home. I joined the Long Beach Garden Club and took mom to the meetings. She and I worked in the kitchen with the other octogenarians. Her rheumatoid arthritis worsened and eventually she could no longer work in the kitchen. I helped her make arrangements each year, and then one year I made arrangements with other people. I don’t remember when. She must have hated it. By that point, I was enamored with my own talent for arranging flowers. I won second prize at my first flower show. “They can’t give you a blue ribbon at your first show, honey,” my mother explained. I felt robbed. I’m sure she did too, but for other reasons.
In 2015, Michael Graves died and I moved to New York City. After that, I only saw my mother on weekends. No longer a resident of Long Beach Island, I had to leave the Garden Club. Both of my parents have passed away in the past two years. I don’t make any flower decorations any more with the exception of little arrangements for dinners or parties, but recently I thought about Constance Spry. Like me, her creativity was awakened by the people she liked and loved. I think about my mom every day. One memory is about pulling the car over on a farm road to gather Osage oranges to put in a bowl on her table. She loved the smell of that strange green fruit, just like she loved the smell of geranium leaves.
This Mother’s Day, I’ll plant red geraniums in terra cotta pots in our backyard. Robert loves the way the leaves smell, too.
-Mary Kate Murray
The Road to a Floral Decoration, or “How I Made This”
The arrangement pictured below was supposed to evoke a piece of artwork. Mine was a “Home Sweet Home” needlepoint. I picked it because no one else did.
Michael Graves had just died and I found a birdhouse template he had made for Target. It was a home of sorts and reminded me of him.
I asked my friend Dodie to make a base for the birdhouse so the flowers could envelope it as they did in the needlepoint.
I took foil bread tins and filled them with soaked oasis to give the flowers lots of water.
I built the arrangement out of foraged and purchased flowers.
Odds and Ends…
Mother’s Day is coming up on May 14. This is a gentle reminder that cocktail books make great Mother’s Day gifts!… Alia Akkam wrote a fascinating article about a mysterious cocktail recipe book that has made its way around the floor, bartender to bartender… Bartender Misty Kalkofen talked to David Suro-Piñera and Gary Nabhan about Tequila and Mezcal for Liquor.com… Speaking of Liquor.com, Prairie Rose was recently named Senior Editor of the drinks-related website… Three Dots and a Dash, the Chicago tiki bar, will celebrate ten years in business on June 4. Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, Grand Army will turn eight on May 6… David Wondrich and Noah Rothbaum talk about the made-up history of Navy Strength Gin on their podcast “Fix Me a Drink.”
My favorite foraged decorations are the evergreen boughs and holly that show up in our house every Christmastime!
What a wonderful piece. Your arrangements are always stunning...and now I need to find a copy of that book!