Human Flower Project

Monday, January 17, 2005

Democracy in Monochrome

All-red flowers for an inaugural ball? U.S. politics sets the tone, and floral designers follow suit.

Photo: American Institute of Floral Design

Newspapers in Anchorage, Portland, suburban Chicago—across the U.S.—have been featuring hometown florists who’ve been tapped to work on the 55th Presidential Inauguration events.

Ever since Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, the Society of American Florists has taken charge of floral decorations, this year inviting 200 volunteers to work long days under 40-degree conditions. “The Society of American Florists calculates that 250,000 flowers and a mountain of foliage will be cut and stuffed into 3,000 arrangements and 200 seven-foot-tall topiaries, destined for nine ballrooms, three dinners and three official receptions.”

While all the design decisions come from on high, and most of the preparations have been kept secret, the Washington Post’s Linda Hales did manage to wheedle a few details out of one volunteer.

“‘The predominant color is blue,’ confirmed Dennis Buttleworth, a Cincinnati florist working on the inauguration who has seen plans for the official ballrooms.

“The choice of hue is not about reaching out to the Other States. Inaugurations are simply caught in a patriotic cycle of red, white, blue and gold. Bush planners exhausted red in 2001. Too much white would look like a wedding. An overdose of gold would suggest a coronation. So it’s blue by default.”

And the flowers? “It has to be an all-American product,” lead designer Ian Prosser told the paper in Boca Raton, Florida. Oops. Heavy rains in Southern California put the squish on that display of patriotism. Philadelphia florist Charles Kremp, who’s the florists’ liaison with the inauguration committee proper, “said an emergency call went out Sunday to flower sources in the Netherlands.” More flowers will be shipped from South America.

For $40 million, all January’s rites can do is affirm November’s election. And this election evidenced a sharp, vivid and widening split in American society. A fascinating series of stories by Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing of Austin spell out just how long this rift has been in the making and how deep it goes.

“The two parties today not only represent different political philosophies but find their core support in different kinds of communities,” Bishop writes in one article from The Great Divide.  “The nation has gone through a big sort, a sifting of people and politics into what is becoming two Americas. One is urban and Democratic, the other Republican, suburban and rural.”

The florists who’ve come to work on GWB’s second presidential bash come from across the U.S., but not throughout it. There are designers from Redlands, California; Anchorage, Alaska; Reno, Nevada—Bolingbrook, Illinois, not Chicago; Lake Oswego, Oregon, not Portland.

And so it comes as less than a surprise that for Thursday’s Democracy Ball “everything is to be in shades of red.”

Florist Mark Silacci told the Salinas, California newspaper,  “Monochromatic is really hot in design right now.”

You said it, Mark.  In U.S. “democracy” too.