Obsessions: Irish Times writers reveal how they would spend their time on a perpetual vacation. This week, Orna Mulcahy on the passion forflowers that led to the perfect bouquet
Oh to be the kind of woman who can gather a lot of grasses and wild flowers together in a tin can and turn them into a stunning arrangement. I love flowers. Not the mean bunches you get in supermarkets, padded out with bristly fern, flowers by the armful; 50 iris together, 10 stems of Casablanca lilies with wide-open, perfectly filled petals; whole bucketfuls of anemones in purple, red and blue; big clusters of yellow parrot tulips, that after a few days in a vase have grown inches and look as though they are straining to get out.
Some people go shopping for clothes or shoes on Saturdays. I go to the flower market in Smithfield to ogle the boxes from the Netherlands and South America. (And for this I have to get up at 6 a.m.) I love buying flowers and having them in the house. But it's not enough to love them. You have to know what to do with them.
Bored with dumping the same old bunch of expensive lilies into a designer vase, I wanted to learn how to make gorgeous displays using just a handful of flowers and lots of fascinating foliage. I went on about it so much that my husband gave me a gift of a two-day intensive course at the Boerma Institute in Alsmeer, the flower centre of the Netherlands.
The Boerma, it seems, is the Harvard of floral design. Students travel thousands of miles to enrol in its diploma and master classes, and come back for refreshers in bridal bouquets and funeral wreaths. It's ruinously expensive. Private tuition costs around €500 a day while diploma courses run into thousands - but it's an investment. Students at the Boerma are billeted with families in a local corporation housing estate. My landlady ushered me into a room with a very small camp bed and a huge poster showing 200 types of flower which, she expected, I would want to study.
My one-on-one tuition started with an agonising session with Keth, a Malaysian dress-designer turned flower artist, whose tiny busy hands were cut in a thousand places. No wonder. The basic tools of the trade are small, very sharp knives for slashing at stems, and lots of different widths of very sharp wire.
We spent hours wiring ivy and sticking it into a block of oasis in a scarily symmetrical way. And here's a tip on oasis: never push them down into water, let them sink down gradually by their own accord so they absorb fully. It was important to start at the very beginning of formal flower-arranging, Keth said - building up a leaf clad base on which to arrange groups of flowers in a set format, that has its origins in Dutch flower arrangements of the 17th century. Help! All I wanted was to impress my guests and my mother-in-law. The preparations seemed endless.
Flowers must be treated properly, otherwise they will ruin your arrangement with rotting stems and wilting heads. Vases have to be spotless, water clear and cool with flower food added in, stems should be stripped of leaves and wiped with a clean cloth, ends cut straight across, not on the diagonal, and wired, if necessary, to keep them perky.
Keth was a slave driver. The leaves had to be wired just so . . . do it all over again please . . . this corner looked a bit ragged, that rununculus was drooping too much, this group of flowers looked somehow wrong, better start over, and so on. All this as he chain-smoked and discussed each member of the English royal family. It took me all day to make a severely elegant table arrangement of foliage and all-white flowers. It would take Keth about 15 minutes, he said.
He also showed me how to make a fast display using nothing more than a square tin filled with oasis, a few twigs and a couple of big showy alliums. And I made mental notes on a truely spectacular arrangement left over from an earlier master class - a lot of willow with tulips drooping from test tubes tied to the branches.
The next day it was a crash course in hand held bouquets with Anya. This woman is nothing short of a genius, holding and turning a bouquet, inserting tricky stems with as much ease as she lit and relit an endless stream of cigarettes. The hand-held bouquet is a monster of a thing. Take your eye off it for a minute and it turns into a raggedy mess.
By lunchtime I had cracked the hand-held bouquet and had made one to take home with me that evening. It got star treatment on the flight home, with its own seat while the air hostesses raved about the delphiniums and the peonies. By the time it reached Dublin Airport I was ready to give up the day job and open a florist . . .
