Trying Not to Soft-Petal a Delicate Job

The flower arranging business is no picnic. Think of poor Dion O’Bannion.

There’s Deanie, as he was known to his pals, puttering around aimlessly in his Chicago florist shop with a pair of pruning shears, when in walk a couple of Al Capone’s meanest thugs and blow his brains out.

Now, you can believe the standard story if you like--the one that holds that O’Bannion, one of Prohibition-era Chicago’s most ruthless crime bosses, was getting a bit too frisky in that town’s bootleg wars and managed to get on Scarface’s B list--or you can consider the idea that Deanie was rubbed out because he didn’t know squat about flower arranging.

Which was true. The florist shop was a front. O’Bannion was much too busy watering down bathtub hooch, top-hatting in the Loop and taking potshots at guys whose names ended in vowels to give much thought to floral aesthetics.

That’s substantially true for most people, actually--at least the part about the flowers. Almost everybody likes them, but flowers aren’t often considered as a decorator item in the same league as wallpaper or French doors. People will fill their homes with Faberge eggs, Lionel trains, stuffed bunnies and back issues of National Geographic and congratulate themselves on their finely honed fashion sense, but let someone bring up the idea of a few vases of flowers and their brows start to knit.

This doesn’t surprise Michael Smith. As president of Chris Lindsay Designs, the Costa Mesa mega-florist that provides the holiday posies for the Ritz-Carlton and Four Seasons hotels, he knows that decorative flowers can be like Candice Bergen with a cavalry saber: beautiful but intimidating.

“There are a lot of different interpretations of floral design,” he said. “Some people think it’s just blue carnations in a vase in the corner.”

Which, he said, is fine, if that’s all you want. And if you want to have flowers in the house on a pretty constant basis, it might not be such a bad idea, fiscally, to keep it that simple. Still, a stroll around the Chris Lindsay shop and warehouse reveals a much broader potential.

First, it might be well to point out that floral arrangements from pros like Smith usually are used for special occasions--particularly the holiday season--and not simply as an everyday household design element. In fact, said Smith, fully 20% of his business comes in the three weeks following Thanksgiving. However, it is the high visibility of the holiday arrangements, combined with what Smith says is a growing appreciation in Orange County for the artistic use of flowers indoors, that can open many eyes to the colorful possibilities.

A dominant idea in much of Smith’s work involves the use of a theme. It likely isn’t enough, he says, simply to fill a room with flowers. In fact, much of the arrangements may not be floral at all, but combinations of ribbon, branches, metal sculpture, miniature statuary, ornaments and other non-organic items. The whole becomes a component of a room arrangement that is unified in colors, textures and purpose.

For instance, says Smith, Chris Lindsay is working on arrangements for an Opera Pacific benefit later this month with the principal theme of the wine god Bacchus. Flowers, of course, will figure prominently, but so will cherubic statuary (they look a bit like Bacchus as a boy) and grapes. Lots of grapes.

Christmas trees begin to enter the floral design picture around the first week in December but, again, Smith said a theme--or at least a dominant design idea--elevates the tradition beyond the usual. Lights on the tree are fairly predictable, but a little exaggeration isn’t: Smith said that his shop once hung a 12-foot tree with 4,000 lights, “every branch wrapped with them.”

If you have traditional ornaments that have been in the family for years, a pro will find a way to incorporate them into the design but, says Smith, don’t expect to see the tree trimmed in what he calls “shiny brights from K mart.” If you think of the tree as one giant floral arrangement, to be hung with ribbon and music scrolls and imitation birds and tiny trumpets and anything else unexpected and thematic, you begin to get the idea.

Also, he said, “it’s becoming fashionable to have two Christmas trees in the house, one maybe in the entrance hall that people can see when they first arrive, and another one in the living room.”

None of this comes particularly cheaply from a pro. Smith says his smaller floral arrangements average about $65 and the whoppers can run to several hundred dollars. Also, he says most arrangements will begin to wilt substantially after about three days. But, at least in Orange County, more and more homeowners are turning to decorating for special occasions with organic items.

So by all means, fill your favorite vase with roses every Wednesday. But in the weeks ahead, you may want to consider a visit to your favorite florist for a bit of interior decorating that your guests will enjoy and remember and that you can have at least two additional days of fun with.

But if you arrive at the same time as a couple of guys carrying violin cases who look more like Palooka than Perlman, stick with the roses in the vase for the time being.