Flowers are commonly used in the worship space but are not always subject to the same level of reflection as other aspects of the environment. This article presents some basic suggestions regarding the use of flowers in worship based on both liturgical and practical considerations.
A liturgist and a florist make a good parish partnership, especially if the two encourage each other to imagine the best possible marriage of available plant materials to how these are used in worship. Here is a primer on flowers, written to jog the imaginations of anyone with responsibility for the parish worship environment.
Cut Flowers and Force Blossoming Branches. These flowers can add life and color to those things in liturgy that are most important: perhaps a wreath of alstroemeria around the processional cross, a great blossoming plum branch set near the paschal candle, a bed of seasonal flowers under an icon in the gathering place, a few white gardenias floating on the baptismal waters, rings of roses to crown the confirmed.
When selecting flowers, respect the season and learn the traditions associated with certain flowers: anemones for Good Friday, asters for Michaelmas, snowdrops for Candlemas, black locust for Pentecost. All of this will become less arcane for the parish if year by year you draw into worship the flowers not so much of greenhouses but of fields, orchards, and gardens.
Many cut-flower arrangements add tedium to our worship. Sprays of gladioli, mums, and ferns look like what they often are: leftovers from weddings or funerals. While it may be wonderful to share such flowers, they often appear in the Sunday assembly on an erratic schedule, with little regard for the season. It is better, although ambitious, to come to depend on certain parishioners who take responsibility to use “leftovers” to best advantage, livening them up with garden flowers, rearranging them, even giving them away if they are inappropriate. Such people have the important task of maintaining a consistency in the use of flowers on Sunday.
Spring-Flowering Bulbs: Daffodils, Tulips, Amaryllises, Hyacinths, Freesias, Irises, Lilies, Crocuses. This wide range of flowers, available from December through April, are generally inexpensive, fragrant, and splashy. The flowers ride atop homely foliage. Flowering bulbs are short-lived, good for just one Sunday. (Lilies and amaryllises last for two, maybe three weeks.) You can get another Sunday’s worth out of them if you have some way of keeping them at 40 degrees (not freezing) during the week.
Flowering bulbs can spark up grouping of longer-lasting flowers. They’re often used on Easter Sunday but rarely at Christmas. Why not add a few pots of white tulips among the poinsettias, or a broad range of spring flowers rising from the straw of the creche? Blood-red amaryllises or a crock of violet crocuses fit on Palm Sunday, perhaps near the cross.
Flowering bulbs are best up close. A single pot placed in the vestibule or gathering space is more hospitable than a mass of these flowers behind the altar. Great banks of them in a warm church can create a horrible odor. Leave that for conservatories where the temperature can be kept low.
Cool-Weather Flowering Plants: Azaleas, Cineraria, Cyclamens, Calculations, Primulas, Hydrangeas, Martha Washington Geraniums, Chaffinches. Like oysters, these plants are mostly available in months with an “R” in them. If they get conditions they favor, they have very long-lasting flowers. (A cyclamen can bloom for six months straight.) All need 60-degree temperatures and lots of sun. Most fall apart—especially azaleas and hydrangeas—if the soil dries out or remains waterlogged for just a few hours. Yet even under the worst conditions, many will remain beautiful a month.
The ubiquitous chrysanthemum falls in this category. True mums are cheap and long-lasting, but with the exception of the pastel, daisy-type ones, they belong to autumn. It’s worth your while to learn what cyclamens, calceolarias, and cinerarias are. These tongue-twisters are spectacular, with the same usefulness as mums, but they look much more fitting in spring. “Cineraria” means “rising from the ashes,” a nice bit of Eastertime lore, and you won’t find a brighter blue flower to grace a baptismal font.
Potted plants look better if you order them without foil and ribbons, knock the root balls out of their original containers, then arrange them in giant pots—such as the several-foot-wide Italian terra cotta pots found on occasion at garden centers. (Partially fill them with sand or perlite.) Tilt the flowers to their best advantage and stuff into the pot as many plants as possible. One super pot of the same type of plant looks better than a scattering of smaller pots.
Tropical Plants. They make beautiful occasional visitors to church, but otherwise, they need to be kept in a greenhouse or other good growing conditions. Perhaps tropical plants will remain healthy in those very few churches flooded with natural light. For example, a spectacular flowering hibiscus in a plant store won’t last a month in a dimly lit church, and even under more favorable conditions, all the flower buds will likely drop unopened.
The poinsettia is an example of a flowering tropical plant. In good conditions, they can stay colorful all winter, but in most churches, they drop their leaves by Epiphany.
Foliage plants tend to become permanent fixtures that can create a problem no different from any clutter in the worship place. They get neglected. Most tropical plants look out of place during autumn and during Lent or Eastertime (what does a schefflera contribute to a worship environment in spring?), and they look especially bad alongside Christmas greens.
Only rarely have I seen foliage plants make a contribution to the iconography of worship. As an example of their good use, behind a baptismal font, a creeping fig (Ficus pumila) had been allowed to form a delicate tracery as it grew over a stone wall. It seemed the same sort of artistry as might go into the creation of bonsai. Another example was the placement during Lent of (rented!) succulent plants in the gathering area near the niche where the parish’s processional cross remained through the week.
A Few Guidelines. A very large quantity of flowers and greenery put in the worship place often winds up looking like a transplanted rock garden, and it easily reminds people of the places we often see such banks of plants: shopping malls. Surrounding fonts with plants may speak of “life” to some, but it can obscure many more subtle understandings of the significance of the font. For similar reasons, it isn’t good to use the altar or ambo as a backdrop for plants or to use plants in such numbers as to cause an assembly to notice their cost more than the delight of their profusion.
As a general principle, flowers or plants should be used as iconography—sacred images that draw us into the divine. During certain seasons and days of feasting, we relish being surrounded with such living “icons,” images of the Creator, God incarnate, God our Savior. During certain seasons and days of fasting, we put aside such iconography to remind us of our exile and the distance we have yet to travel on our journey. And during all the other times of the year, we get small glimpses into heaven, Sunday by Sunday, through such reminders as a handful of cattails or a noseful of lilacs.