Horticultural Renaissance man Ryan Gainey arranges to delight an old friend.
In his trademark straw garden hat and French canvas apron, Ryan Gainey adds stems of Osmanthus fragrans to an arrangement of tulips, daffodils, and peonies that stretches high above his head. It is March as he stands on the terrace of his garden in Decatur, Georgia, and the internationally renowned plantsman and garden designer has been asked to do the flowers for an upcoming 90th birthday celebration.
“I don’t do flowers any more professionally, but this was a special occasion for a dear friend,” Ryan says, and so he readily agreed.
The birthday celebrant is Laura Maddox Smith, whom Ryan has known for quite awhile.
“When I began working as a garden architect 25 years ago, Mrs. Smith gave me my first commission and we continue to work together,” Ryan says. A mutual love of gardens is the tie that binds their friendship.
“I knew the flowers for her would have to be garden-esque, as if they had been grown in the garden just for this occasion,” he comments. “I wanted a combination of store-bought and home-grown, and I particularly wanted to use fragrance and color to embody the sweet and loving nature that is Mrs. Smith’s.”
He has several arrangements to create: a large one for the buffet table, built upon a 30-inch terra cotta putto, and smaller bouquets for the dining tables. Weeks before the event, he placed his cut flower order. And not just any peony was to be included, but a wonderful old one that grows in the South, “Sarah Bernhardt.” Tulips were chosen to convey the very essence of spring. Hydrangea macrophylla was added to the order, but Ryan was emphatic that the blossoms be pale blue with as much green as possible.
Now at home with his flowers, he has begun to work. The hydrangeas had been placed in water for two days to hydrate as much as possible.
“Anybody who has done flowers knows that when you’re working with hydrangeas, you’ll have some that flop,” he explains. “There’s nothing you can do. So buy extra.”
The containers for the flowers were filled with Oasis which had soaked in water overnight. Ryan’s advice for arranging with woody stems is to use a container that will hold Oasis and water and to push the stems all the way through the Oasis so they actually reach the water.
“I like to work on my arrangements in a situation that reflects where it is going to be placed,” he says. “With something as tall as this particular bouquet, my garden table is exactly right.”
Ryan’s years of gardening wisdom spill forth as he works. And his philosophy on arranging results from his particular vantage point.
“If you want to set yourself apart as a flower arranger, you need to be a gardener,” he imparts. “I build an arrangement, put in the store-bought flowers, and, because I’m outside, I can walk through the garden and see loropetalum and ‘Pistachio’ daffodils—perfect additions. My native crabapple is coming into bloom, and here are stems of barberry. It isn’t that I have two dozen branches of this and ten branches of that. I may only have three of this and one of that, but that’s enough to add the essence of my garden and make the arrangement an intimate expression of our friendship.”
The main arrangement complete, Ryan created a nosegay to complete the picture. “It looked to me like the putto needed to be carrying something full of charm and romance, so I added a nosegay of ‘forget-me-nots’ and narcissus.”
Binding the flowers with green ribbon, he couldn’t help but quote from A Garden of Remembranceby James Terry White, “The heart is a garden; remembrance is its sweetest flower.”
