Church architecture often features towering columns. Aside from their load bearing value, their soaring beauty is symbolic of trees, mountains, or towers, giving the illusion of joining Earth to Heaven. Columns can also be fun to decorate. Just ask members of the Flower Guild at Grace Church, Charleston (SC), a Gothic Revival church founded in 1846.
During a visit to Charleston last fall, internationally known floral arranger Derek Armstrong demonstrated his ingenuity with a colorful column arrangement made from three broken flower pots wired onto a board and covered with reindeer moss. A medley of metaling roses, orange zinnias and Granny Smith apples spilled from the pots onto fatsia leaves, palmetto fronds and pyrocantha branches. The arrangement was put into motion by semicircles of bear grass, by color lines of mauve roses and green apples and by zigzags created from the alternate placement of the palmetto.
Rising to the challenge, Flower Guild members followed suit with their own designs. Cindy Blackburn assembled a column cross made with pink roses and a moss wreath, draped with amaranthus. Ann Cotton designed a column arrangement featuring bamboo, birds of paradise, orange roses and pyrocantha. Another column creation, made by Nancy Allen, featured teddy bear sunflowers and circus roses on a grapevine web, spiraling downward.
As graceful and appealing as the unadorned columns of Grace Church are, the temporary addition of floral colors, form and scent enhanced their beauty all the more, to the delight of parishioners and visitors alike.
