This past weekend I took an ikebana class with Sotheavy at a local plant shop called Chloe & Mint. The class was led by Sachi from Enn Floral Design and was a lot of fun! I recently came across the store on Instagram but had never visited, so attending the class was the perfect way to visit AND learn something new. I’ve tried my hand at flower arranging at home with Trader Joe’s bouquets, but wanted to feel more confident in the arrangements I create at home. Also, despite having a strong interest in the Japanese language and culture over the years, I knew next-to-nothing about ikebana.
Sachi is a professional floral arranger for a casino on the strip but was raised in Japan, so she started the class by giving us a primer on ikebana. She said that – at least for this class – the goal wasn’t to get a lot of height in the arrangement, but to go more for roundness and imitating the imperfections of nature. As an example, she said that nature doesn’t evenly space flowers apart from each other, so making clusters of similar flowers looks more natural and pleasing to the eye.
She said that ikebana follows a few rules, one of which is utilizing the fibonacci sequence – this one really resonated with me because of my math minor in college. Essentially, you use the numbers in fibonacci (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8) as the quanitites of different flowers. Our bouquet had:
1: peony
1: nigella
2: sweetpea
3: lisianthus
5: roses
8: filler (eucalyptus varieties)
Another trick that ikebana uses is to give flowers different heights so that they look more natural, and also to leave some space between stems, giving them some breathing room. I loved the flowers that Sachi chose to use in this class, they were the perfect colors for an autumn bouquet. I was extremely happy with how my arrangement turned out and will definitely be implementing the things I learned in future Trader Joe’s creations!
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