Making Floral Arrangements From Weeds

"Flowers," says Lottie's husband in Enchanted April (shortly before she has an affair with a man who tells her she has "the face of a disappointed Madonna") "are a luxury of the most blatant kind." How true. They are an expensive and short-lived shorthand for a gracious life that, tragically, usually end up parked next to the computer monitors that anchor our days instead of by our bedsides.

But they are so very pretty and, of course, alive. Meghan Daum, in the New Yorker essay "My Misspent Youth," wrote about packing up and moving to Nebraska because she'd become a fresh-flower-buying, $45-drinks-and-satay-consuming New Yorker--who, as a result, was facing crushing debt. The logic is irregular, but that essay launched the second phase of her career. So, in a sense, she was both made and undone by extravagances of the most blatant kind. How's that for instructive?

Personally, I think weeds and stolen branches from flowering trees are the middle ground between beauty and the poor house. They may lack the smell and sculptural beauty of orchids and gardenias, but hell, they're free. The most exciting arrangement I ever had in my college dorm room was an armful of yellow forsythia I clipped from somewhere.

Climb Aboard:

1. In the right container, any flora can look cool. If your clippings don't fill up the whole neck of the vase, though, I've found that they look nicest tied together with a little string or ribbon and inserted into the vase at an angle.

2. Use what you got. I find that since I started scooping up handsome weeds by the side of the road, I look at plain-old evergreen needles, trees, shrubs, autumn leaves, mysterious red berries, and the weird chestnuts that pelt me on the shoulder when I walk under trees with new interest. I have even thought about snipping some of those red berries off shrubs in municipal parking lots late at night. Perhaps the compromise there is to seize clippings from neighbors who have just finished doing yard work. (City kids: the secret to branch grabs is stealth.)

3. Finally, don't go out foraging bare-or empty-handed. For one thing, you'll need scissors—unless you have really strong teeth. What's more, you'll want to protect your palms from thorns and sap spills. Besides, when you're picking up things by the roadside, you're less likely to be taken for a prostitute if you're wearing work gloves.