Buffalo Winter Flower Project - Week 4

What I have called "The Buffalo Winter Flower Project" is doing everything I hoped to this point - keeping the wintertime active and stimulating. Doing work and engaging in practice brings an endless expansion of qualities to living everyday life...and making one's future work, skills, and potential that much greater. Here is a look at some of the "considering" I have been engaged in with this project.

​1. "Access." Before this project I had only bought cut flowers at the consumption end but never as part of the production process. I have been learning the WNY wholesale market and seeing a larger field of possibility in niche mail order as well as local specialized growers. Personal relationships (AKA Ferncroft) make this possible. One can't find this world on google.

​2. "Looking." I see "florals" as microscopic renderings of isolated landscape ideas. I am more acutely attuned to the landscape around me this winter as I am trying to find "interest" out there in the dull winter garden. On the one hand, the ever present question running through my eyes is "what can I forage for this weeks project?" But, (Holy cow!!!), I assure you, as garden designs start being imagined in the next week or two for the springtime, the "winter interest" in my work will be nothing like it has been in the past.

​3. "Place." Being based in foraging, the works created in the project become isolated representations of the landscape around me. A criticism that is brought to my third week's project is, "It looks awfully Christmassy." Fair. I recognize the connotation when one uses coniferous greens in floral work. Yet, to me, at the same time, it is January and what else is available? This just points out that anything "green" in January floral work is something that is going to be shipped in or greenhouse grown - which, I'm not suggesting is negative in anyway - only I'm in question of exactly what it means to be "seasonal." Is "seasonal" market based or is "seasonal" place based?

​To get away from "Christmas greens" this week, I used Oak branches, Miscanthus plumes, the seedhead of a perennial I do not know the name of, and Privet Berries.