Today's floral designs venture into the art world

NEW YORK -- Here's a novel recipe for a show-stopping bridal bouquet:

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String together hundreds of pine needles with copper-colored jeweler's wire cut into six-foot lengths. Layer the strands over and over until you've created a cylindrical "chandelier" dangling from the bride's hands to the floor, then stud the shimmering mass with rust-colored orchids.

Stand back and wait for the guests to catch their collective breath.

Pine needles may hardly be what a typical bride dreams of carrying down the aisle, but they were just one of the creative ingredients capturing imaginations at a recent symposium held by the American Institute of Floral Designers.

Of the dozens of wedding bouquets shown, not many would likely appear in the pages of Elegant Bride. But the choices were a dazzling collection of blooms and other flora arranged in combinations and shapes most aptly called an art form all its own.

Individual rose petals were rolled into tiny tubes, strung together with decorative wire and added to the edges of an otherwise standard armful of tightly bound, long-stemmed red roses. Blades of ornamental lily grass were wound into interlocking loops for an Asian-inspired design that included orchids from Singapore. And if the stunning bouquets were not enough, how about a bride covered from the top of her up-do to the tip of her strappy sandals in flowers?

One of 10 educational programs sponsored by AIFD at the New York Hilton July 4-7 featured just such a display. Philadelphia designer Ron Mulray constructed a wig of baby's breath, covered a slim-fitting gown in pale rose petals and stuck stephanotis to his model's skin as jewelry. The design cost about $3,500 to create.

The annual event draws about 1,500 floral designers and trade professionals from the United States, Canada, Asia and Europe as well as a small number from Central and South America. Flower wholesalers and the dry goods vendors who supply vases, chemicals and other products to the trade underwrite the event for an exclusive group of florists.

Membership is limited to top designers, those able to pass a rigorous two-part exam. Applicants must first take a written test, then design five arrangements within four hours using only the flowers and containers supplied by AIFD's membership committee. In 2003, 164 people took the test, but only 83 earned the right to add "Accredited in Floral Design" to their business cards.

"It's our doctoral degree," Wesley Fox, an AIFD member who traveled from his home in Tennessee this year to help evaluate candidates, said.

In this world, the most creative - some would say outrageous - florists show off their talent by creating living works of art. They draw inspiration from nature and high-tech, from Chinese landscape paintings and from the canvases of Vincent van Gogh.

Such highbrow work occasionally sparks tension among AIFD members, some of whom want to show off their art while others come to the conferences looking for ideas more easily sold to middle America.

"I'm a pretty simple designer," said Sylvia Nichols, an AIFD member who does party work in Cheshire, Conn. "That paycheck has to be written at the end of the week for me and for everybody else in the shop."

It seems not many brides are looking for pine needle bouquets, which are labor intensive and cost at least $500 to make.

The question of whether such a piece might stand on its own as a work of art is likely to be decided by traditional cultural institutions like galleries and fine art schools, said Susan Feagin, a research professor at Temple university who specializes in aesthetics and the philosophy of art.

"The Euro-American conception tends to take objects that have durability and consider them art," she said. "If you look at the way that art history has been told, it does leave out objects that use materials that are more ephemeral."

Those ideas are beginning to change, however. Feagin noted, for example, the Japanese floral arranging tradition called ikebana, in which the integrity of materials, form, shape, color and rhythm dictate designs meant to evoke emotion. And installation artist Jeff Koons has made headlines around the world with various installations of a towering puppy-shaped sculpture covered in living flowers and plants.

"It is part of the nature of the activity that there will always be artists out that are sort of talking to other people in their own field," Feagin said. "If history goes the way it should, then the cream of the crop emerges from that, but we won't know what it is for 100 years."