What Makes a Flower Feel Old World?

"Old World" has become one of those phrases that is in danger of meaning everything and nothing at all.

It's applied to houses built last year, restaurants with dim lighting, and floral arrangements containing anything vaguely brown or trailing. Add a stone urn and a piece of rumpled linen, and apparently we've arrived in eighteenth-century Europe.

I use the phrase myself. Bloom & Bounty's flowers are decidedly old world in spirit. But what exactly do I mean by that?

Not that every arrangement should resemble a Dutch still-life painting, though I certainly wouldn't object. What I'm after is less a recognizable style than a way of seeing. It begins with the flower itself. Many flowers today have been bred to travel well. They grow on long, straight stems, bloom on schedule, and survive refrigeration and shipping remarkably well. “Good little soldiers”, as I call them. I'm grateful for that—especially in the middle of winter.

But usefulness always asks something in return.

Sometimes it's fragrance (a waste of energy when there are no bees available to pollinate inside a hoop house). Sometimes it's delicacy. Sometimes it's the gentle curve of a stem that grew toward the sun instead of toward the roof of a greenhouse.

An old-world flower still looks alive. Its stem may bend. One bloom may face a different direction than the others. It may have opened a little too far or carry the faint evidence of having lived through real weather.

It has not entirely surrendered its nature for our convenience.

Perhaps that's why I've never been especially interested in perfection. The flowers I love most usually contain a small surprise: a tulip bowing under its own weight, a vine wandering beyond the arrangement, a rose opening well past the stage most florists would consider ideal. To me, those are the flowers that remind us they were once growing in a garden.

Season matters, too.

Part of the pleasure of flowers is waiting for them. Lilacs feel miraculous because they disappear almost as quickly as they arrive. Sweet peas are treasured because their season is heartbreakingly short. The first narcissus of spring carries a different joy than one we could buy every week of the year.

When every flower is available all the time, we lose something more valuable than variety. We lose anticipation. Perhaps that's what I really mean when I say "Old World." Not nostalgia. Not antique vessels or European gardens (though I love both).

Simply flowers that still feel connected to the natural world—to time, to season, and to the quiet imperfections that make living things beautiful.

A little evidence that nature has not yet been made to behave.