Take a Break: Try Ikebana

It’s incredibly hot in Vermont-a June heat wave that lasts three days is a bit unusual. Since I have to do a program for Winter Solstice, I thought planning this event was the perfect "cooling" distraction. With a focus on Asian cultures, it wasn't long before I found myself enthralled with Ikebana.

 

Ikebana is the centuries-old Japanese art of arranging flowers. The practice, which roughly translates to “making flowers come alive,” uses carefully selected blossoms, greenery and other flora to convey a specific feeling or emotion to an observer – just as a painting or sculpture might.

 

People train for years to do this, but I’m finding a lot of satisfaction trying new ways of composing things. While mowing the lawn, not a task I’m wild about, I found myself looking at the wildflowers and plants in a whole new way. 

 

While I’ll post some videos below, as well as some simple directions, check out Ikebana 101 for more detailed information. 

 

Step 1: Visit your garden, park or neighborhood and collect items (flowers, twigs, small branches, grasses, leaves) that you like or in some way inspire you. 

 

Step 2: Most arrangements have between 5-13 stems so you’ll need to limit. Start by identifying what you know you absolutely want to look at and work from there. Crooked twigs, branches with a lot of leaves and other items can all be modified to fit your design. Ikebana tends to be sparse and not symmetrical. The goal is to achieve a sense of balance and harmony. 

 

Step 3: Pick a plate, bowl, vase or whatever you have on hand. While the Japanese use a frog to pierce the stem, you can use small stones, florist tape or other items to hold your display in place. There are different schools of ikebana. In the Ohara School of ikebana, arrangements are composed of three principal types of stems, subject (shushi), object (kyuaku shi), and secondary (chu kanshi), which are fitted in low basins with a kenzan (frog). The subject is the tallest stem—roughly double the size of the container (the diameter and height of the bowl). The “object”  is one-third of the subject’s size and is placed in the front center. The secondary stems are fillers, rounding out the arrangement. They should be somewhere in between the subject and object, or roughly two-thirds of the length of the shushi. Below is a video that shows the placements. 

 

Sometimes watching videos designed for kids is a simple way to learn something.