I was chatting with an auction-house staffer when I glanced to my right and noticed the flowers on a tall artificial plant. The plant was among a long row of others like it just behind the woman. I had noticed them before but had ignored them because they were artificial.
This plant – which resembled an Angel’s Trumpet – was unusual because its flowers not only had open blooms but also dying ones. I found it very strange that fading flowers would be added to artificial plants to make them look real.
Are those dying flowers, I asked the staffer, who was just as amused as me. Looking at the row of plants behind her, I suddenly became curious about the large groupings of artificial shrubbery situated along the walls around this room, and small potted plants in baskets on a black metal stand near the entrance to the adjoining room.
That’s when she told me the story about the plants: They had been in a shop that was sold. The previous owner left all of them behind and the new owner was about to toss them when the auction house suggested that they be consigned for sale. “We can sell them,” she said that the owner was told.
So they ended up here rather than in the trash, which was a good idea. Everything sells at auction. Although I didn’t attend this actual sale – I was there the day before to preview – I’m sure that every one of the plants got a bid. As part of a presentation that my collector-friend Rebecca and I give, we try to impart the importance of not giving your stuff away. There’s always a buyer for just about anything. What you may consider junk just might be worth something.
The auction staffer remembered passing by this New Jersey plant shop pretty often before it closed, noticing the plants in the store window lit up with strands of lights. Several of the plants behind her still had their lights.
These plants are expensive, she added, and she wasn’t kidding. I spotted one artificial plant, a Dracaena about 3 feet tall, with a $65 price tag. A split-leaf Philodendron bore an orange tag with a price of $49.99, with 50 percent off, which I assumed was part of a store-closing sale.
I’m not a fan of artificial plants. Why buy fake when you can get the real thing in their natural – OK, so you do have take care of them – live beauty? I’ve always bought real. It just felt good having living plants in my home that grew and/or flowered as I took care of them. They were just full of life, unlike the artificial ones that accumulated dust and just sat there.
I do like silk flowers, though. I even have a yellow silk Cymbidium orchid in a vase on the piano in my living room, been there for a couple years.
To be honest, I didn’t even know artificial plants were so popular that they were still being made and sold. So I decided to check out a few on the web, and found some of the prices to be astronomical. The original prices for the auction plants were cheap compared with what I found on the web. A 6-foot three-ball topiary similar to one at auction was selling for $335 on one site. I did find other artificial and silk plants for much less.
One English retailer of artificial trees noted that they were made nowadays to look as realistic as possible. “The injection moulding method requires plastic to be injected into a preformed metal dye to create a realistic look and feel to modern artificial flowers,” the company stated. This is injection moulding on something of a smaller scale than what you would get with, say, plastic injection moulding in Sydney, but, then again, this is for a different purpose.
“Artificial flowers have been seen as a work of art, made from simple rice paper in China right through to stunning glass at the Harvard University; artificial plants are the ultimate decorative dedication. Ancient Rome used luxurious, lavish gold and silver artificial flowers to show the wealth and decadence of its rulers and hierarchy.”
I was curious about the reference to Harvard and decided to take a look. The Harvard Museum of Natural History has a collection of plants known as the “Glass Flowers.” The collection was created by the father and son team of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, who, starting in the late 19th century, began creating glass plants and marine organisms for collectors, museums and universities all over the world. Here’s one of their glass flowers.
The Corning Museum of Glass in New York has a large collection of the original drawings of the studies of the plants and animal the two used for their glass models.
