On The Design and Production of Floral Arrangements, Landscapes, and Gardens

​From and image I can never make a one-to-one copy of a floral arrangement or garden. It can never be the original; at best the artist can attempt a simulation of the original.
​Even to discuss this "simulation," we would have to pull apart and recognize how we understand what "the original" is.

​As a designer, I might say the original has a sense, "a gesture," a poetic, a fantasy, a statement, or a signification in the language of the field.

Secondly, the original has its form, its tactility, its visual quality. I may speak of this as texture, proportion, intensity, balance, repetition, unity, form, shape, etc.

The struggle always confronted - creating anxiety, depression, and separation - is in the translation from the artists body, where and how the artist knows the original, into language that the consumer uses. We'll call this "The Discourse of Flowers" (following Roland Barthes), a language seperate from the body and sensibility.

As when the artist
Opens her mouth to utter
"We aren't using Peonies or Ranunculus"
- and everything you so much love and know,
Only simulations of them,
"Translations"
So-to-speak
Translations to best approximate the original you've
shown us.

At this point
​Meltdowns begin.



​