The lichen is made up of at least two organisms: fungi and algae, which carry out photosynthesis in symbiotic harmony. The other day, the Brooklyn Museum was invaded by lichens of unusual composition. The huge, rippling pools that spread across the museum floor—swirling green, pink, brown, red, and yellow—were made up of approximately twenty thousand chrysanthemums, carnations, zinnias, and cockscombs.
They were the work of Emily Thompson, a New York floral designer whose tastes run toward the wild and overgrown. Lichen is a pet fascination. “I grew up in a place with really beautiful rocks,” said Thompson, who is from Vermont. “And of course the best rocks are the ones that have developed lichens.” Thompson trained as a sculptor before turning to flowers and has created projects for fashion shows, restaurants and the White House. At last, she had found a client willing to make her long-standing fantasy of lichen-inspired flower arrangements come true: fashion designer Ulla Johnson, whose Spring-Summer 2023 collection debuted in the Brooklyn Museum’s Fine Arts atrium.
Johnson’s show was scheduled for 10 a.m. Sunday, and the flowers began arriving at 8 a.m. Saturday. Thompson had ridden his bike to greet the trucks. He was working with a team of fourteen other florists, who were dressed mainly in black; Thompson, who has curly hair and wears reading glasses attached to a thick green chain, was dressed in a sturdy cotton shirt and forest green pants; he compared the look of it to a ranger’s uniform. After loading several loads of flowers onto a forklift, he gathered his team in a circle in the center of the ten thousand square foot space. He handed out clipboards with a floor plan, reference photos of lichens in psychedelic colors, and pictures of a sample lichen flower mosaic he had assembled in his Manhattan studio.
“This is not a map that you are going to follow,” he said. The floor plan showed what looked like five continents of irregular size and shape, to be carpeted with the heads of stemless flowers laid flat on the ground. “What I really want to see is his own ideas about how colors mix and contrast,” he explained. The plan also marked the “Vogue shot”: the walk down the catwalk that the press cameras would capture in their final photographs of each outfit. Ideally, things wouldn’t get too pretty. “Seduction-repulsion, always!” Thompson said.
The florists went to work arranging flowers on cotton tarps that they had spread across sections of the floor. Thompson began building a wall of crabapple branches, one of the few elements in the facility that rose more than an inch from the ground. “It’s like being a beaver,” he said. Prey high and sturdy, he paused to walk around the atrium and examine the patterns taking shape on the canvas. Chrysanthemums with pale lavender petals tipped in neon green nestled alongside curly burgundy carnations tipped with pink, interrupted by waves of yellow cockscombs.
“I love this hideous gray-purple,” Thompson said, pointing to a group of carnations. “It’s like a corpse, a rotting corpse.” Her progress excited her: “It’s much better than when we did it in the studio. It’s much better with all these human brains.”
Progress, however, was slow. (Real lichens often grow less than a millimeter per year.) “Crush your carns,” he advised the team, that way the flowers would take up more space. “We have to start. I want to see fifty percent soon.” After lunch, she walked to the Vogue photo booth and gazed into space with her hands on her hips. She considered helping out with the tarps, but she trusted the other florists more, because they had been working for hours. “There is a strange communion that happens,” she said. “Their minds merge a bit.”
Ulla Johnson was scheduled to inspect the lichen in the early afternoon. (“I’m very practical,” she explained.) Thompson spent the remaining time asking flower vendors for favors; more pink mommies were on the way. “Florists are always doing something with saliva and toothpaste,” she said.
Johnson, when he arrived, was concerned that the green and brown spots looked too much like camouflage. “The brown is killing me a little bit,” he told Thompson.
“She’s bringing out the ugly,” Thompson told a colleague. But this was to be expected. The work of the mentally merged florists was being included in the larger ecosystem of the event.
A minute-long fashion show created a bountiful biome that dissolved almost as quickly as it took form. By Saturday night, the atrium was packed with spectacularly haired photographers, electricians, lighting technicians, carpenters and musicians, as well as the group of mostly blond Johnson employees who communicated closely. A migrating flock of models arrived on Sunday morning, followed by the show’s three hundred and twenty-five guests, many of whom stopped to photograph the puddles of flowers before taking their seats.
The Scavengers, a team from an event cleanup service called Garbage Goddess, were the last to show up. They came after the show, dressed in overalls dyed with plants, and transported the now-wilted flowers to a composting facility on Long Island. ♦
Source: www.newyorker.com