On March 20th, we’ll be teach­ing at The Hunt­ing­ton Library in our month­ly series how to cre­ate a gor­geous gold­en age flo­ral design that looks a lot like one you’d see in a Fred Astaire and Gin­ger Rogers movie.  Check out Fred above — buy­ing all the flow­ers in a hotel flower shop to try and woo Ginger.

Stu­dents will learn about flower arrang­ing tech­niques that were made pop­u­lar in the Britain and Unit­ed States dur­ing the 1930s. We’ll be using all white flow­ers and green­ery that would have been right at home on the “big white sets” of Fred and Gin­ger movies. We’ll make an arrange­ment that has a sim­i­lar flow and feel­ing to the one I cre­at­ed above with Ranun­cu­lus, Ama­ran­thus and Fox­tail fern. This design was inspired by the phi­los­o­phy of Con­stance Spry,  described as the “Martha Stew­art of mid-cen­tu­ry Britain.” She found­ed a flower school, over­saw Queen Eliz­a­beth’s Coro­na­tion flow­ers and wrote many books on the art of flower arranging.

Gin­ger Rogers is the Star of the Month on Turn­er Clas­sic Movies. Tune in March 10th to see a marathon of Fred and Gin­ger movies, check out the flow­ers and fan­tas­tic sets and then come to our class on the 20th to cre­ate some­thing classic.