Here´s a little peek at the demo from Saturday’s Summer Wildflower Workshop. The replay and notes just went out for those who booked but missed the live Zoom. We had a lot of fun! For the demo I used some 5 ft tall foraged fennel!
To be notified of our next live class, you can sign up for flower mail below here.
Maggie is a student in our Flower Arranging 101 course. Her work is lush, garden-inspired, and organic. I love this flower crown made from foraged flowers. It has movement, drama, and volume but at the same time it feels natural, wearable, and light.
The hand-tied bridal piece and this English style garden arrangement both allow the eye to focus in on focal flowers but offer texture too. I love Maggie’s work!
Check out more student work here.
Have a great weekend!
Floral work and photos by Maggie Harris.
I didn’t know it at the time, but there were some key moments I can remember where I started to learn resilience, the power of taking responsibility, seeing challenges as temporary, and appreciating the beauty in every single day to power yourself through difficult external circumstances. Flowers played a huge role during that time, and my first flower arranging book was actually inspired and created from those years.
Because I believe in the healing power of flowers based on my own experiences, I am always excited to read studies about how flowers can positively contribute to our mental health. Here’s one study I poured over recently that made me smile. The summary below:
An Environmental Approach to Positive Emotion: Flowers
by Jeannette Haviland-Jones, Holly Hale Rosario, Patricia Wilson, Terry R. McGuire
For more than 5000 years, people have cultivated flowers although there is no known reward for this costly behavior. In three different studies we show that flowers are a powerful positive emotion “inducer”. In Study 1, flowers, upon presentation to women, always elicited the Duchenne or true smile. Women who received flowers reported more positive moods 3 days later. In Study 2, a flower given to men or women in an elevator elicited more positive social behavior than other stimuli. In Study 3, flowers presented to elderly participants (55+ age) elicited positive mood reports and improved episodic memory. Flowers have immediate and long-term effects on emotional reactions, mood, social behaviors and even memory for both males and females. There is little existing theory in any discipline that explains these findings. We suggest that cultivated flowers are rewarding because they have evolved to rapidly induce positive emotion in humans, just as other plants have evolved to induce varying behavioral responses in a wide variety of species leading to the dispersal or propagation of the plants.
Honestly, after working as a florist, this study is no surprise to me! If you carry flowers through the street, people turn and smile and strike up conversation. I’ve had dozens of conversations or exchanged smiles with sweet grandmothers here in Portugal who share a love for flowers, despite the language difficulty on my end. My moods are always better when I have fresh flowers woven into my space.
The authors of the study also suggest that flowers play a role in evolution! This intrigued me:
Here’s how flowers help support the so-called Big Bloom theory of evolution: Flowers cause positive emotions, and research shows that from an evolutionary standpoint, positive emotions make people better survivors. That’s because positive people are more likely to maintain social relationships, reproduce, find needed resources and be creative. Many flowers and plants rely on humans to fertilize them, nurture their growth and remove the weeds that would choke them to death. In return, they give us pleasure.
“The way they repay us is that they have developed little chemical factories that decrease anxiety and improve our mood,” Haviland-Jones said.
Here is another fun breakdown from Psychology Today about how flowers offer dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin! The author even mentions how discovering wildflowers can trigger all of these chemicals! Read more here.
I already know most of this by experience, but it is great to have it acknowledged! 2020 and 2021 have been an incredible opportunity to share this idea of flowers for healing! I’ve taught lots of classes to corporate teams this year and a half for exactly this purpose. I always hear how much they love opening their boxes of organic flowers before the class, touching fuzzy leaves like lamb’s ears, interacting with fragrant stems of lavender, and learning to collaborate with ingredients to create arrangements that lift their moods and offer a dose of nature to their homes and workplaces!