Floral decoration

Floral decoration, art of arranging living or dried plant material for adornment of the body or home or as a part of public ceremonies, festivals, and religious rituals.

Since the earliest days of civilization, humans have used floral decorations, composed of living or dried cut-plant materials or artificial facsimiles, to embellish their environment and persons. Flowers have played an important part in folk festivals, religious ceremonies, public celebrations of all kinds, and, of course, courtships. Sophisticated cultures have generally expressed a love for decorating with flowers by carefully arranging them in especially chosen containers, while other societies have used them more informally: strewn, made into garlands and wreaths, or casually placed in waterholding vessels without thought of arrangement.

Elements and principles of design

The term flower arrangement presupposes the word design. When flowers are placed in containers without thought of design, they remain a bunch of flowers, beautiful in themselves but not making up an arrangement. Line, form, colour, and texture are the basic design elements that are selected, then composed into a harmonious unit based on the principles of design—balance, contrast, rhythm, scale, proportion, harmony, and dominance. Line is provided by branches or slender, steeple-like flowers such as snapdragon, delphinium, and stock. Form and colour are as varied as the plant world itself. Moreover, forms not natural to the plant world can be created for contemporary abstract compositions by bending and manipulating branches, vines, or reeds to enclose space and create new shapes. Texture describes surface quality and can be coarse, as in many-petaled surfaces such as chrysanthemums, or smooth, as in anthuriums, calla lilies, and gladioli. There are many variations between these extremes. Leaves and woody stems also have varied textural qualities.

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A flower arrangement includes not only the flowers themselves but the container that holds them and the base on which the container may rest. If an accessory, such as a figurine, is included, that too becomes a part of the total design. The whole composition should relate in textural quality to its frame of reference, which might be a wood or glass table top or a linen cloth, and should be in close harmony with the style of the room for which it was planned, be it Louis XV or Danish modern.

As the components of a design are selected and combined, a silhouette, or arrangement outline, is created. This outline is generally considered most interesting when the spaces in the composition vary in size and shape. Third dimension, or sculptural quality, is accomplished by allowing some of the plant materials in a grouping to extend forward and others to recede. Flower heads turned sideways, or toward the back, for example, break up contour uniformity and draw the eye into and around the composition. When a formal, static quality is sought, the contour is restricted or evenly shaped, often into such graduated forms as a pyramid or mound.

Balance is psychologically important, for an arrangement that appears to be leaning, top-heavy, or lopsided creates tension in the viewer. (Occasionally, however, as in some modern arrangements, this is the very effect desired.) Colour as well as the actual size of the plant material influences design stability. Dark colour values look heavier than light values; a deep red rose, for example, appears heavier in an arrangement than a pale pink carnation, even though they are the same size. An arrangement in which dark colours are massed at the top and light colours at the bottom can therefore appear top-heavy. Similar flowers placed in identical positions on either side of an imaginary vertical axis create symmetrical balance. If there is an unequal distribution of varying flowers and leaves on either side of the axis but their apparent visual weight is counterbalanced, asymmetrical balance is achieved. This compositional device is more subtle and often more pleasing aesthetically than symmetrical balance, for its effect is less apparently contrived and more varied. Contrasts of light and dark, rough and smooth, large and small, also give variety to the composition. An arrangement generally has a dominant area or centre of visual interest to which the eye returns after examining all aspects of the arrangement. An area of strong colour intensity or very light values, or a rather solid grouping of plant material along the imaginary axis and just above the container’s rim, are devices commonly used as compositional centres. The rhythm of a dynamic, flowing line can be achieved by the graduated repetition of a particular shape, or by the combination of related colour values. Scale indicates relationships: the sizes of plant materials must be suitably related to the size of the container and to each other. Proportion has to do with the organization of amounts and areas; the traditional Japanese rule that an arrangement should be at least one and a half times the height of the container is a generally accepted use of this principle. Proportion also relates to the placement of the arrangement in a setting. A composition is either overpowering or dwarfed if placed on too small or too large a surface or in too small or too large a spatial setting. Harmony is a sense of unity and belonging, one thing with another, that comes with the proper selection of all the components of an arrangement—colour, shape, size, and texture of both plant materials and container.