Required Reading: ‘Punk Ikebana: Reimagining the Art of Floral Design’
“Gathered, gleaned and composed in situ” is the sub- subhead for the latest offering in book form from California-based flower decorator and friend to Gardenista Louesa Roebuck.
Conceived as a maximalist tome that tears up the rulebook for authors as well as florists, our obvious first question is: what’s “punk ikebana”?
Photography by Ian Hughes, from Punk Ikebana (in bookstores today).
An arrangement of grape vine, rose, and pokeweed, we hazard (botanical captioning seems suddenly very prosaic).
Louesa Roebuck does not claim to be an ikebana artist, but she is a bit of a punk—a rebel against convention who thumbs her nose at hierarchies (and who has worked with the likes of Vivienne Westwood).
Persimmon and Japanese anemone looking very much at home.
Punk Ikebana is not a how-to (the publishers describe it as an art book), and its exterior graphics, embossing, and texture tell a story of the sensuousness of the arrangements within.
Floral visionary and proto-punk Constance Spry loathed the connotations of those terms and settled on “flower decoration” to describe her trade, and that was in the 1920s.
Ceramic telephone pole insulators, repurposed.
The way of the vase has to be personal—and questioning, too. Show some respect for the plants and put some thought into the vessel—this is a theme that runs through Punk Ikebana.
“We decided that aspic makes a flower frog and can replace floral foam.”