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Lichen is made up of at least two organisms: fungus and algae, photosynthesizing in symbiotic harmony. The other day, the Brooklyn Museum was overtaken by lichen of unusual composition. The vast ruffled puddles that spread out across the museum floor—swirls of green, pink, brown, red, and yellow—were composed of approximately twenty thousand chrysanthemums, carnations, zinnias, and cockscombs.
They were the work of Emily Thompson, a New York flower designer whose tastes run toward the wild and the overgrown. Lichen is a pet fascination. “I grew up in a place with very beautiful rocks,” Thompson, who is from Vermont, said. “And, of course, the best rocks are the ones that have developed lichen.” Thompson trained as a sculptor before turning to flowers, and has created projects for fashion shows, restaurants, and the White House. At last, she’d found a client willing to realize her long-standing fantasy of lichen-inspired floral arrangements—the fashion designer Ulla Johnson, whose Spring-Summer 2023 collection was making its début in the Brooklyn Museum’s Beaux-Arts atrium.
Johnson’s show was scheduled for 10 A.M. on Sunday, and flowers began arriving at 8 A.M. on Saturday. Thompson had biked over to greet the trucks. She was working with a team of fourteen other florists, who wore mostly black; Thompson, who has curly hair and wore reading glasses attached to a thick green chain, was dressed in a sturdy cotton shirt and forest-green pants; she compared her look to a park-ranger uniform. After several freight-elevator loads of blooms had been ferried upstairs, she gathered her team in a circle at the center of the ten-thousand-square-foot space. She handed around clipboards with a floor plan, reference photographs of lichen in psychedelic colors, and pictures of a sample lichen flower mosaic she’d assembled at her Manhattan studio.
“This is not a map you’re going to follow,” she said. The floor plan showed what looked like five continents of irregular size and shape, to be carpeted with the stemless heads of flowers placed flat on the ground. “What I really want to see is your own ideas of how the colors blend and contrast,” she explained. Also marked on the plan was the “Vogue shot”: the path down the runway that press cameras would capture in their definitive photographs of each outfit. Ideally, things would not get too pretty. “Seduction-repulsion, always!” Thompson said.
The florists set to work laying flowers on cotton tarps they’d spread across sections of the floor. Thompson started building a wall of crab-apple branches, one of the few elements of the installation to rise more than an inch off the ground. “It’s just like being a beaver,” she said. Her dam aloft and sturdy, she paused to take a lap around the atrium to examine the patterns taking shape on the tarps. Chrysanthemums with pale-lavender petals tipped in neon green nestled beside crinkly burgundy carnations edged in pink, interrupted by ripples of yellow cockscombs.
“I love this awful gray-purple,” Thompson said, pointing at a clump of carnations. “It’s like a corpse, a rotting corpse.” The progress excited her: “It’s so much better than when we made it in the studio. It’s so much better with all these human brains.”
The progress, however, was slow. (Actual lichen often grows less than a millimetre a year.) “Smoosh your carns,” she advised the team—that way the blossoms would take up more space. “We’ve got to crank. I want to see fifty per cent soonish.” After lunch, she walked to the vantage point of the Vogue shot and surveyed the space, hands on hips. She considered pitching in on the tarps, but she trusted the other florists more, because they’d been at it for hours. “There’s a weird communion that happens,” she said. “Your minds meld a bit.”
Ulla Johnson was scheduled to inspect the lichen early that evening. (“I’m very hands on,” she explained.) Thompson spent the remaining time calling in favors from flower venders; more pink mums were on the way. “Florists are always making something out of spit and toothpaste,” she said.
Johnson, when she arrived, worried that the patches of green and brown looked too much like camouflage. “The brown is killing me a little,” she told Thompson.
“She’s taking out the ugly,” Thompson said to a colleague. But this was to be expected. The work of the mind-melded florists was being subsumed into the event’s larger ecosystem.
A minutes-long fashion show brought into existence a teeming biome that dissolved almost as quickly as it took shape. By Saturday night, the atrium was full of photographers, electricians, lighting technicians, carpenters, and musicians with dramatic hair, in addition to Johnson’s pack of closely conferring, mostly blond staffers. A migratory flock of models arrived on Sunday morning, followed by the show’s three hundred and twenty-five invited guests—many of whom paused to photograph the pools of flowers before taking their seats.
The scavengers, a team from an event-cleanup service called Garbage Goddess, were the last to appear. They came after the show, wearing plant-dyed overalls, and transported the now wilting flowers to a compost facility on Long Island. ♦
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