Orange Kees Nellis tulips still attached to the bulb need no further accompaniment.

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Winter '09 :: Master Class
flower talk

A contemporary design of Selaginella and blue violets from Año Nuevo Flower Growers in northern California suits a white ceramic container made by a friend of de Jong-Stout.

“I never place my flowers. They place themselves,” says Alisa A. de Jong-Stout, describing the pieces she demonstrated at The Village Garden Club of La Jolla in January 2009. “I don’t direct; I just listen. They’re like children. If you tell them what to do, they usually do the opposite.”

With more than 40 years of floral industry experience as a designer, horticulturist, instructor, consultant, de Jong-Stout has undoubtedly achieved great success from listening to her flowers.

During her demonstration, titled “Recognizing the Wisdom of the Flower: Let the Bloom Itself Guide You to the Beauty of a Unique Design,” she walked the audience through seven distinct floral designs, including everything from flowers and moss to shells. She opened by creating a hand-tied bouquet.

“Hand-tied for many people is mysterious, and they are scared of it,” explains de Jong-Stout, author of A Master Guide to the Art of Floral Design and owner of her own studio, It Blommenhûs in El Cerrito, California. “One of the secrets is that you have to lay them in one direction and you cannot cross the stems,” she confides.

Her bouquet included white hydrangeas, small green anthuriums, grape hyacinths, Juliet roses, white and soft yellow spray roses, geranium leaves, and miniature Italian pittosporum. Once it was completed, she presented it to the Village Garden Club of La Jolla’s Program Chairman, Penelope West.

A weaving of bamboo intertwined through anthuriums and Phalaenopsis orchids in blue ceramic bottles all housed in a metal container.

“That was very charming and sweet of her,” West says. “Afterwards, we auctioned off her pieces, and they were well-received. She is an accomplished presenter and has a unique style.”

For her next creation, de Jong-Stout’s assembled an arrangement of Kees Nellis Tulips, flowers grown in Oregon and California though the bulbs are originally from Holland. The day before her demonstration, she took the tulips with the bulbs still attached and arranged them in a circle the same circumference as the container. After gluing them together, she placed them into large clear glass container.

“It’s fun,” she says, of the stylistic decision to keep the bulbs attached. “I feel like florists can make complicated things because they are very interesting, yet I feel the flower itself can do just as well.”

Designs that can be kept for longer periods also appeal to de Jong-Stout and she included several of these. She displayed a “living wreath” containing four ivy bare root plants, white hydrangeas, ranunculus, lisianthius, freesia, spray roses, and miniature pittosporum set into a sturdy wire wreath in a clear glass container. To achieve this look, she cleaned the roots on whole ivy plants then set them directly into the bowl. Using this method, the bottom of the arrangement can be kept for months at a time.

Next, de Jong-Stout presented a contemporary design of geometric lines made with selaginella (little club moss) plants and blue violets. Eva Hecht-Poinar, a friend of Alisa’s for more than 40 years, made the large square ceramic container that held an impressive 36 plants with an inch layer of Oasis floral foam in the bottom.

The instructor, Alisa A. de Jong-Stout

“I wanted something really simple, something striking,” de Jong-Stout describes. The blue violets have their own unique history, as she tells it. Grown at Año Nuevo Flower Growers in Pescadero, California, the ancestors to the violets she used in her demonstration were first brought over from Italy in 1892 in the coat pocket of the grandfather of the current owner, Don Garibaldi.

After displaying a weaving arrangement of lichen branches, zygopetalum orchid plants, and Spanish moss, de Jong-Stout moved to her grouping design, an idea that occurred to her when she wanted to use an inexpensive container for another group of students and thought of wine bottles.

On a previous trip to Texas for an event, she had expanded this idea and, using tequila bottles, made a weaving more than 10 feet long. For the La Jolla event, she mixed blue and green colors in the piece (which consisted of two metal containers holding ceramic bottles filled with anthurium leaves, calla lilies, Kniphofia (or red hot poker) Phalaenopsis orchid plants, and bamboo to reflect the colors of the ocean. She connected the bamboo to the bottles with approximately 20-inch-long, yellow-green metallic wires, intentionally leaving the wires longer in order to draw attention to their color, which complemented the metal container as well as the anthurium blossoms.

Her last collection was inspired by her use of shells for her son’s ocean-side wedding. Incorporating materials such as miniature Phalaenopsis Taisuco daisy orchids and Spanish moss, she showed three different shell wreaths, which were accomplished using glue, wire wreaths, hard Styrofoam wreath forms, and floral wire. Other orchid designs featured intact root systems that were then set inside small shells as “very simple but very effective” arrangements.

Summing up her aesthetic, de Jong-Stout says, “If I look at nature, it is so smart. I cannot compete with it. I am willing to sit down and learn from it...I became a designer because I wanted to tell people about beauty, and I felt the best one to talk was the flower.”

Winter 2009 | By Angie Brown | Photos by Douglas Sandburg, Marge Palmer & Ted Stout