Comments (0) Best Flowers as Art - 2011
Holly Flora
Sick of sending your sweetie the same old tired dozen roses? Try Holly Flora instead. Proprietresses Holly Vesecky and Rebecca Uchtman are more floral sculptors than garden-variety florists. Remember when Machine Gallery took over the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and someone built a giant replica of Sam Francis' Toward Disappearance out of white carnations? That was Vesecky's handiwork. Since then, she and business partner Uchtman have made a name for themselves reinventing the flower arrangement. Vesecky's resume includes miniature volcanoes that erupt in a shower of petals, cat statues covered in succulents and driftwood chuppahs draped in jasmine. For the Natural History Museum's First Fridays exhibit on elephants, she strung orchids on fishing line, then dangled them over an elephant-foot skeleton and a subwoofer speaker playing pachyderm stomping. With each boom, the tiny orchids trembled. Not quite ready for flower art with a capital "A"? She'll also make you a simple bouquet. It will, no doubt, be unusually elegant. By appointment only; call for details. (310) 559-5705, hollyflora.com.
—Gendy Alimurung
