Decooh trends

New design evolves, new flowers are designed. Lisa White, Chic Art Fair, Kordes and Reineri have together created an encounter between the worlds of culture and horti-culture.

The result of this innovative hybrid cooperation is a new rose, the ‘Chic Paris’, designed and refined to inaugurate the very first Chic Art Fair in Paris.

Created by nature but designed by man, the ‘Chic Paris’ rose has been several years in the making, at one of the world’s most important rose breeders, Kordes.  Born from their highly diverse gene pool, the ‘Chic Paris’ rose is a vibrant white with green shading, reflecting the green architecture of the prestigious Cité de la Mode et du Design, home of the Chic Art Fair.

This event is conceived and orchestrated by Lisa White, your Horti-Culturalist, who creates ties between nature and culture, art and industry. She is backed by Reineri, a company that links Holland’s finest growers and breeders to leading floral artists and designers. The aim of both Lisa and Reineri is to showcase the highest-quality, rare flowers at cultural events, to demonstrate to the public the incredible variety available in nature.

On Saturday, October 23, the  Kordes rose will be officially baptised the ‘Chic Paris’ at the fair’s  Art and Design Prize ceremony. The winning artist and designer will also become the official godparents of the ‘Chic Paris’ rose, which will then be available in France under this name.

For more information: lisa.white@orange.fr

After Slow food, Slow sculpture…

As a participant of the newly launched Ten Ten Ten project at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, USA, Dutch jewelry  designer Ted Noten decided to work with the museum’s Womens Auxiliary group. In the North Carolina’s genteel southern social climate, one wonders how Noten conjured up this project: after all, he is the man who conceived the iconic acrylic women’s designer bags containing golden guns…

Noten found the women to be the strong driving force–culturally, organisationally and financially–behind the museum, and his project is in homage to their powers. He created a 3-D printed nylon bust based on Grace Kelly and 10 other women throughout American History. He then gold-plated the bust and covered it with 400 3D-printed daisy magnet pins. During the opening on October 1st, and every year, the 22 newly elected board women will each be able to take a signed and numbered pin from the bust, slowly revealing the face beneath.

Of course, the daisies are also a teasing commentary on women’s social clubs and Junior League tea parties. But the Women’s Auxiliary can take it…

This orchid-eater image has been selected as the emblem for the current Decooh! plant and design fair in Brussels. When we created this image, with Lisa White, your horti-culturalist, as art director, Josh van Gelder as photographer and Graham Hollick as stylist, little did we know what an iconic image it would become… tantalizing, tasty, and even a little bit trashy, it takes orchids into another realm entirely.

The Decooh newspaper also features an interview with your horticulturalist, and you can read it while it’s hot, here:

BezoekersKrantENGdef

Last week, at the first edition of Salon during Amsterdam’s fashion week, floral engineer Andreas Verheijen created blooming storefronts with a variety of chrysanthemums. Using them in unusual ways, he proved again that one can be avant-garde with even the most common flowers.

Salon, a new initiative intended as a reflection on fashion and culture, is focused on generating ideas. Concept-driven more than consumer-oriented, it is about being at the beginning of the creative process.

In a similar way, flowers are often at the beginning of a concept: bearers of a new message, symbols of a fresh start, flowers can play a very important role in communicating, inspiring and expressing culture.

Alive and lively, seasonal and varied, flowers express ideas in breathtaking ways. Not only do they inspire designers but they also draw visitors into spaces, naturally.

Did you ever make a terrarium as a kid in the 70′s? Flower Power is making a comeback, and so are those fascinating little green worlds… Kali Vermes of Grow Little makes positively poetic ones in her Paris atelier. She takes hand-blown glass bubbles and fills them with the miniature plants of your choice.

The plants then go about living their own lives while you observe them through their glass bubble. Like a Planet of the Plants, one can imagine all sorts of things happening in these tiny, verdant worlds.

These wonderlands are completely contemporary, yet besides their 70′s vibe they also hearken back to Victorian curiosity cabinets and Wardian cases, and even Dutch still life paintings.

If you are not near any terrarium creators in Paris, New York or San Francisco, you can make your own by following the video here.

They are also a fantastic way of finally owning your own piece of land…

The inspiration of eminent botanist Patrick Blanc may soon hit the supermarkets… If marketing execs from Carrefour and other hypermarkets attended the latest version of Paris ‘ Jardins Jardin in the Tuileries Gardens, then we will soon be plucking our lettuce, still growing, from tropical walls. Blanc succeded in astounding the general public with his plant walls, convincing us that plants can indeed grow vertically. In doing so, he invented an entirely new method of urban gardening, all the way up. From the walls of his Pershing Hall and Quai Branly to the stalls of Whole Foods is but one small step. Here the young horticulturalists of OMA édition have taken inspiration from Blanc’s work and conceived a sort of garden shelving system that would excite inveterate ubanites to pluck produce from supermarket walls….

To be relished and replenished,

Lisa

The most headline-catching Chelsea garden was the Ace of Diamonds by David Domoney. At exactly the same spot as the controversial plasticine garden of 2009, the crystal garden welcomed £20 million of real diamonds and 300 kilos of bodygards. But despite all the hype, the dynamic combination of amethyst and lavender was an eye-catching mix of organic and mineral material…

The Champs Elysées became a true field this weekend, with over 150 different species of flowers and plants from all around France, planted in parcels along the full kilometer of this famously traffic-clogged avenue. The weather was perfect and 2 million Parisians turned out to enjoy the wheat, lavender, hops and roses, as well as four separate forests, orchards and animal farms…

1000 workers, mostly young farmers and horticulturalists, began installing the gigantic gardens on Saturday night, wheeling out metres of grape vines, colza, lupines and apple trees.

Visitors began arriving early Sunday morning including, of course, President Sarkozy, who came to reassure France’s worried farmers, who are concerned about their future, for many reasons… The conceptor, Gad Weil (who planted a full avenue of wheat along the Champs Elysées 20 years ago) and the landscape architect Laurence Médioni explained that their primary goal was to get the public involved and sensitive to farming and environmental issues. Each parcel of land in the enormous garden patchwork was sponsored by private companies, such as the Guerlain scent garden, and on Monday evening the plants were sold off to the public and donated to charities, dispersing a bit of France’s agricultural heritage to each of Paris’ arrondissements.

Though the traffic lights were set on red for cars, they would have been more inspiring as Go Green for plants,

Lisa