Sunflowers Reimagined: Floral Designers Strip Petals to Challenge Convention

In August 1888, Vincent van Gogh painted four sunflower still lifes in Provence while awaiting Paul Gauguin, a series whose final canvas juxtaposes seven blooming flowers with drooping, seed-exposed heads. Cultivated by Native Americans as early as 3000 B.C. for food and medicine, sunflowers reached Europe via 16th-century Spanish explorers and later appeared in William Morris's woodblock prints and Oscar Wilde's 1882 poem 'Le Jardin.' Ubiquity—over a million acres grown in the U.S. last year—rendered them a visual cliché on place mats and throws. Now, floral designers are reclaiming the bloom by removing its iconic golden petals. In Brooklyn, Michelle Pelletier, 31, of Love Me Not Floral strips petals from ProCut Orange flowers to expose what she calls 'something weirder, organic, even borderline grotesque.' In Amsterdam, Mylène Leeflang, 31, co-founder of Midi flowers, removes cheerful corollas, leaving dark centers of tiny florets and rings of pointy green bracts; for a recent event she paired these spiky heads with knotted bear grass for an 'almost confrontational' effect. Because the flower symbolizes bucolic joy, Leeflang says, 'taking away the warmth, the abundance, it becomes something bold.'