This piece is built around Icelandic poppies, and the idea was to recreate the place they actually come from.
Despite the name, Icelandic poppies are not really from Iceland. They grow wild in the subarctic meadows of Asia and North America, in cold, rocky ground where almost nothing else survives. Out there they rise on bare stems out of low cushions of moss and tundra plants, which is why the botanists named them Papaver nudicaule, the naked-stemmed poppy. The petals look like crumpled tissue paper and last only days, and somehow that fragility is the appeal.
The dome of green trick dianthus is my stand-in for those tundra cushions. It has the same soft, mounded texture the poppies grow through in the wild, so the stems come out of it at their own angles the way they would at home, buds and all. The buds matter, because they keep opening for days after delivery and the client gets a slightly different arrangement every morning.
The snake ball alliums tie it all together. Their stems curl and loop in ways no florist could fake, and they give the whole piece its whimsy.
I built it in the studio and delivered it to a client in the Design District.