By Mark-Ellis Bennett
Biltmore Beacon correspondent
Ikebana is the subtle art of Japanese floral arrangement. It instructs in over a thousand schools, or distinct philosophies of arrangement, some modern and some with their roots in antiquity. The Asheville chapter of Ikebana International has a membership that instructs in four of these schools. Ikebana International is an organization sharing its traditions of creativity from its various disciplines that bring nature and mankind together in this intimate way. The chapter recently welcomed Sibbie Wilson who gave three demonstrations for their April meeting at the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Wilson, an advanced instructor of the Ohara School has been teaching for the past 11 years. The Ohara School, one of the first taught in the west, is modern and naturalistic. For her arrangements she used round 18 inch wide bowls a couple inches deep with pin frogs, also called kenzans, to hold the flowers in place. Her first Ikebana “upright” form, was made with tulips, baby’s breath and ti leaves, added in that order. Wilson explained the stems on the tulips she planed to use had lost their turgidity, so to condition the tulips she made a small pinprick in the stems beneath the blossoms, tied the stems to narrow stakes with twist ties, and kept them submerged in sugar water (1 tbs. sugar :: 1 gal. water) overnight. “Tulips get a lot of air in their stems, and once the stem is full of air it can no longer drink. The pinhole allows them to drink and the sugar stiffens the stems.” She also warned not to place arrangements with tulips too close to a window because sunshine will cause the tulips to lean toward the sunlight. “If you trim the stems in a bowl under water the flowers will last longer.” These serve as examples of practical advice made available to attentive students at Ikebana demonstrations.
Instruction in theory, of the Ohara School in this case, follows. The arrangement is built from the back forward, toward the viewer. The first tulip placed would have the tallest stem in the arrangement. This flower is referred to as the “subject.” It leaned about ten degrees from vertical. Wilson said “the second most important placement is the ‘secondary.’” In this arrangement it leaned at between seven and eight o’clock with the stem about two thirds the length of the “subject” and at about 45 degrees from vertical. “It swings out so it’s over the edge of the bowl.” The third is referred to as the “object.” Its blossom had the shortest stem, opened directly to the viewer and was placed at five o’clock. Together the three principal blossoms should form a scalene triangle, or triangle “of sides with unequal lengths”.
