The Lily Guild Fresh flowers.
The Lily Guild Fresh flowers.
When presented with a clump of Valentine’s Day roses, or a
slapdash grocery store poesy, politesse dictates that one responds,
“Flowers; how thoughtful.” But receive an arrangement by niche Toronto
florist the Lily Guild,
and that staid statement suddenly rings true. Dominika Solan began her
business out of her home studio in 2014, selling bouquets too elaborate
to suit the aesthetic of the more conventional flower shop she worked at
by day. “My bouquets are a bit hard to market,” admits the 34-year-old.
“They’re not exactly what people expect to find at a shop. They are on
the border between floristry and art.” Sixteenth-century Dutch art, to
be specific.
Solan’s aesthetic takes cues from the jam-packed vines and blooms
splaying out of darkness in oil paintings by the likes of Jan Breughel
and Jan Davidsz de Heem. “I’m influenced by Dutch and Flemish paintings;
I like those because they’re unrealistic,” she says (many of the blooms
portrayed together in paintings of the era are not simultaneously in
season). “I try to make my arrangements painterly, to strategically
obscure certain flowers, like artists often did. One of the rules of
floristry is to show the head of each flower, but I like the backs of
flowers too, I think there’s something beautiful in them.” Solan is
among a generation of new-wave florists who prefer the imperfect wabi-sabi
charm of abundant, chaotic bouquets to manicured primness and the use
of flowers bred for longevity rather than character (see: scentless long
stem roses). London’s 26-year-old Hattie Fox, for instance, keeps her That Flower Shop stocked with snaking tendrils and berry clusters, while Nicolette Owen and Sarah Ryhanen, co-owners of Brooklyn’s Little Flower School, teach “Dutch Masters-inspired” floral arranging classes, and Vogue-approved
style-star/florist Taylor Tomasi Hill popularized vibrant bouquets
among fashion’s upper echelons (previously strictly white orchid
territory).
Solan’s bouquets incorporate a particular aspect of witchiness—as if
to playfully substantiate the early Christian fear of floral art as a
suspect “symbol of pagan culture,” as Stephen Buchmann writes in his
2015 book, The Reason for Flowers. Solan’s taste runs spooky—which is unusual, for a florist. Her Instagram
feed, for instance, is a Victorian horror show of natural oddities:
Siamese fruits, albino squirrels, antlers, dead birds, insect nests,
skulls; some of which become mixed-media elements in her bouquets. They
are arranged along with plants Solan grows herself, or forages, so as to
access a mix of unusual species not sold at conventional flower
auctions. “I grow zinnia, larkspur, sweet peas, bells of Ireland, and
black knight scabiosa in my garden,” she says. “And I search for wild
clematis, privet berries, and cattails in Georgetown, along the banks of
the Credit River, and then up at my mother’s house in Owen’s Sound. I
stop at embankments and ditches along the roadways where you can find
beautiful stuff—it’s a matter of putting it into a new context.”
The results are creative, refreshing, and far from garden variety.
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