My Creative Workbook

Christine de Beer - effortless floral craftsman

A Floral Fable: Floriograpy Design

This is the fourth and last design I did for my A Floral Fable Design demonstration at the Capilano Flower Arranging club.

The demonstration explores ways to add small floral details to tell your own floral fable or simply express yourself with floral art.

With every design I will demonstrate one concept, thought or idea and by just slightly changing a few of the floral ingredients the design flips over into its contrast.

The moral of our fourth fable is: Never be afraid to go down a new road; you don’t know what great things it might lead to!

Floral Art design using floriography to send a message.

The "new" I am exploring in this design is an updated version of Floriography, the romantic language of flowers.

Floriography is the romantic Victorian language of flowers.

In Victorian times people were much more restrained in what was socially acceptable to communicate.

Contemporary floral art demonstration design using Floriography

So they quite ingeniously developed a secret language to send their messages by types, colours, maturity and method of delivering flowers.

A Floral Fabel Floriography design .

Even the way flowers were received or accepted influenced the message's meaning!

A Floral Fabel Floriography texture design.

The language of flowers is hugely culture dependent and has changed through the years, but some floral interpretations stretches over all cultures and has become fully ingrained in our perceptions, such as:
Red roses meaning true love. It is still the most popular flower to convey the sentiment on Valentine's Day.
Poppies worn for Remembrance Day
Extending an olive branch meaning making peace.

In my last fable I used the Victorian language of flowers to send a message. See if you can guess my message:

In Floriography datk pink roses means thankfulness.

Dark pink roses....

Thankfulness

In Floriography Mature open blooms means gratitude and thankfulness.

Mature open blooms.....

Gratitude and thankfulness

In Floriography Ivy means friendship

Ivy....

Friendship

Thank you for your friendship and of course for inviting me to demonstrate .

My message was: Thank you for your friendship and of course for inviting me to demonstrate at the Capilano Flower Arranging Club!

For more on Floriography visit the wikipedia language of flowers page

Design note:

Textural contrast between the bark and a wood veneer.

As a final design consideration I also demonstrated textural contrast. The one side of the armature was covered in bark: rough and earthy. The other is covered in wood veneer, sleek and tooled.

Every week I add a new design with related tutorials. Be sure to subscribe to receive an email notification with design inspiration.

Tutorials

15 March 2012 Paper log stack

I made this log stack from cardboard covered with bark

29 March 2012 Cover test tubes with moss

Make test tubes look a bit less obvious and more natural by covering them with moss.

29 March 2012 Use a BoutStix Floral Magnet to hang test tubes

This is a fast and easy way to hang test tubes in a design

Favourite Flowers

Rosa

Rose

Related Designs

15 March 2012 A Floral Fable Design demonstration at the Capilano Flower Arranging club

My demonstration explored ways to tell a story with floral art designs

15 July 2020 Pass it on

A cascade of orchids growing over a slice of wood. Easy to design... and even easier to maintain!

15 March 2012 A Floral Fable Design demonstration Floral Art Structures

I did a Floral Art demonstration at The Capilano Flower Arranging club. Over the next few weeks I will show the designs in detail and add the design tutorials. This week I’ll...