After I arranged Ikebana for my sister’s wedding in the spring, my roommates and dearest friends Zac and Monica asked me to do about 28 table centerpiece arrangements for the reception after their wedding. With some added confidence and stress-reducing-techniques after my last endeavor at this scale, I gladly accepted.

Zac Catanzaro is an entrepreneur and musician and producer who most notably does many things for the band Walker Lukens And The Sidearms. If you’ve not yet heard about their Song Confessional project, check it out. Monica Marcano is a coffee connoisseur, witchy lady, and house plant guru. I honestly couldn’t imagine a more deserving pair of human beings to whom I’d give a gift like this - they’re both creative, loving, generous, kind, and (best of all) sassy. It’s a joy to know them and a privilege to call them my closest friends.

If you’ve not yet read about my arrangements for my sister’s wedding, you should definitely read that before you dive in any further here; it provides very useful context for what you’re about to get into.

Ikebana

For those who don’t know, I've been a practitioner of Ikebana (生け花, "living flowers") for several years now. It's a Japanese art form of contemplative floral arrangement that has become one of my favorite art forms to practice. It is also known as Kadō (華道, "way of flowers") and is considered one of the three classical Japanese arts of refinement.

The form has been practiced for more than 600 years. It has evolved during this long period from what were originally Buddhist offerings that were placed on the altar of temples into a developed art form free of its religious origins that are displayed in the home. Practitioners use flowers, branches, and leaves to create living pieces of art. There are many schools of Ikebana, but I have been taught in the Sogetsu School and have studied under artists who venture into the unknown territory of free form arranging and personally have been moving into the more abstract expressionist practices with respectful nods toward the old styles.

Ikebana is an art form that is deeply meditative. Creating an arrangement is typically done in silence to allow the artist to observe and meditate on the beauty of nature so that insight into the infinite and fundamentally sound nature of existence can arise. Seasoned designers realize not only the importance of silence, but also the importance of space, which is not always meant to be filled, but created and preserved through the arrangements. This ties into other principles of Ikebana including minimalism, shape and line, form, humanity, aesthetics, and balance.

It is also imbued with “hidden” meaning. Meaning has been attributed to flowers for thousands of years across the planet, but particularly in Japan. The concept of hanakotoba (花言葉) is the Japanese form of the language of flowers. It is sometimes called floriography, and is a kind of cryptological communication through flowers themselves. While I have been practicing Ikebana for a number of years, I have only just begun my education of hanakotoba. In the work I did for this wedding, I explored the aspects of hanakotoba to the degree I understand it within the relationship between the viewer and the arrangement. In hanakotoba, the emotional connection and poetic communication in flowers occurs directly between the recipient or viewer without needing the use of words.

To become a masterful artist that can express hanakotoba with elegance (something I have not yet fully accomplished) requires a patient commitment to the art and discipline to see it through. The discipline cultivated when arranging flowers in this way creates a situation wherein the artist may experience a deep level of connectivity to the land, seasons, and plants. This art form opens up the possibility of a more nuanced understanding of context of the surrounding ecology and forces the artist to engage with an intense degree of focus and presence. The physicality of arranging forces the artist to open up to the fundamental concepts of space, harmony, and asymmetry.