Florilegium: A Floral Compendium to Enhance Quality of Life

This is an inquiry into arranging flowers to enhance quality of life. It will consider how flowers can accompany life experiences and commemorate life stories through their compositional influences that portray life in relation to botanical growth cycles. Flowers document the passage of time and evoke a sense of occasion. A flower arrangement can portray a milestone event, a loss, or distinguish a life experience. The word florilegium refers to a collection of flowers gathered for their personal significance—an accumulation of nature that evokes aesthetic correspondences. Flowers feature in rituals, remedies, festivity, folklore, cultural traditions and personal adornment and as such have an association to making notable human conditions related to both culture and rites of passage. Floral therapy has also been beneficial to people in need of botanical sustenance and support. Flowers bestow an existential and psychological significance to qualities of efflorescence (coming into bloom) and symbolically becoming associated to human states of being. The following inquiry into flowers is a reflection upon how flowers can accompany life conditions, compensate for states of malaise, and be a source of inspiration.