My Floral Destiny

It was in 2020 at the height of the pandemic and the ensuing lock-down life that I've become a complete flower fan. My garden was my only escape from those do-everything-from-home days. I would put a vase full of garden blooms in my bedroom side table and look at it every 15 minutes, in between those eternal zoom calls.

As I found myself spending increasing amount of time in the garden, I learned to deadhead flowers. Deadheading is a gardening technique where you prune the flower stalks that have started to wilt. By cutting the flowers, the plant continues to bloom, driven by the unsatisfied goal of producing seeds. I then started putting these cut flowers in vases and glass cups, increasingly wanting to arrange in some spectacular ways. And thus, my love of floristry blossomed.

The synergy between gardening and floristry felt so right from the beginning. I have a beautiful memory of our top-of-the-hill house in Seoul where my dad would tend to flowers and trees everyday. This memory has led me to purchase my current house with a relatively big garden albeit never having done any gardening in the past. I actually left my garden neglected for the first 5 years of moving in but then the COVID came and I gladly spent every non-zooming hour in the garden, planting and growing flowers. Isn’t that something?

I once dabbled in painting, trying capture pretty petals in both figurative and abstract style. But soon after I started to enjoy flower arrnaging, I realized that flowers should be my medium as well as my object. I guess my desire to express the beauty of flowers had been there all along. I feel so fortunate to have finally found my own medium, the tool with which to create an object of beauty as I imagine.