Designing with heirloom mums and locally grown marigolds in east Texas

Back in November 2023, at the very end of the local growing season, I collaborated with Monika, owner of the local flower farm Scratch House, to create a few arrangements that would showcase her beautiful flowers. Mums are the common closer when it comes to local farms. Usually the mums are the crop that finishes out the growing season, the flower in bloom when the field is hit by the first frost.

Mums? Meh.

I made sure to hook you with a photo before saying the word “mum” because NO ONE gets excited about mums. They are truly one of the most boring flowers and it’s really our own fault for encouraging horticulturists to keep them so mundane because every fall, we all go out and buy thousands of those perfectly spherical mounds of orange and yellow to go on our porches and in our pumpkin displays.

Mums are not naturally shaped that way.

Heirloom Mums - not your porch mum

At Scratch House Flower, Monika grows a variety of heirloom mums, mums that have a lengthier and purer history, long spidery stems, whimsical formations, larger centers, and a variety of petal shapes and colors. She, along with a rising of other farms, is on a mission to bring these beautiful flowers back into the light, to increase their notoriety, and to establish them as an American grown crop.

MUM? Boring. Basic. Budget—three Bs that are the death of good design. What a fantastic challenge, I thought to myself.
How would I arrange and change this flower into a fairytale princess of blooms?
How could I help people see these flowers in an inspirational light?
To make matters even more difficult, Monika informed me that almost all the flowers available would be orange.
I do not like orange.
And there would be orange marigolds.
What a fabulous design challenge to try to create something you love out of pieces that don’t excite you.

For the Marigolds

The marigolds were so incredible, I had to do an arrangement that showed off their long, bushy stems. Apparently the first crop is typically extra dreamy like this. Oh the things we learn when working directly with the grower!

In some cultures, marigolds are symbolically incorporated into the wedding ceremony design with florists stringing the fluffy blooms together and draping them over the primary ceremony structure (“mandap” in Indian weddings). In light of that, I wired a few of the marigolds together to drape down the front of the arrangement.

For the Heirloom Mums

For the heirloom mums, I wanted to do a design that clustered them in a way that both referenced and rejected the porch mum while drawing attention to its superior qualities (interesting petals, nuanced color, lengthy and curvy stems).

Orange was clearly the dominant color of the day but instead of trying to hide it with another strong color, I partnered the flowers with similarly textured ingredients but more neutral colors. I let the orange of the marigolds shine and tried to draw out more of the pinks in the heirloom mums with some pink toned neutrals. We even experimented with a blush linen.

The photographer Jen Symes is the other hero in this collaboration because our shoot fell on dim, cloudy day yet she successfully transcribing these heavily saturated blooms onto film without feeling garish.

Big thanks also to Nuage Designs, who continues to partner with me in this seasonal still life series. They provided the beautiful linens for the vessels to sit on and we experimented using some of them as backdrops. The quality was fantastic.

If you’re interested in knowing more about the process behind planning a project like this, I go into greater detail on a previous still life project post [read here].
Winter still life in the works and coming soon!

^^^
This arrangement was just for fun using ingredients foraged from around our home and garden. That’s in part what this series is about anyway; playing and finding unexpected joy in the freestyle design. Can you believe the variety in fall colors I managed to find just in our yard?!

Behind the Scenes

I snapped a few images with my phone of the mechanics behind the heirloom mum piece. The base was composed of an intertwining of acorn covered branches which held very steady inside of this particular vessel. I rigged two areas of the branches with small foam cages for that bunched look that I wanted for the false willow (fluffy white stuff) and the upper mum cluster.

The lower middle image shows you the beginnings of the marigold piece for which I experimented with some elevation and base clustering with more heirloom mums.

Sometimes it only looks pretty at the end ;)