These photos are certain to brighten up your day. After all, who hasn’t dreamed about floating around with Monet’s pond surrounded by water lilies in that infamous blue row boat? For 11 years straight I worked on the Marshall Field’s Spring Flower Show in Chicago which was installed in both the State Street and Water Tower stores.
I’m lucky to have these professionally taken photos (which means not by me) to share with you. The year was 2001 and the theme for this beautiful flower show was Linnea In Monet’s Garden. I’ll give you a brief rundown on how a show of this magnitude comes to be. Get ready to enter into a floral fantasy!
These photos of the window displays were taken at the Water Tower store:
The Marshall Fields’s folks chose the theme, took care of all the details regarding the props and orchestrated the overall project. Sometimes there was licensing to deal with and strict guidelines to follow. For this show, Parisian based florist Christian Tortu was contracted as the head designer. I visited his beautiful shop in Paris many years ago. SF Productions, based in California and headed by Steve Podesta, handled everything regarding plants and flowers – specing, buying, designing and maintaining.
Eight semi trucks packed full of vegetation and blooms bought at several nurseries left the Golden State and arrived in Chicago about four days later. No artificial foliage or flowers here! We installed all night long into the wee hours for four days – at least sixty people were involved in the whole process.
I worked on the window displays and as I’ve said before: “working in Marshall Field’s windows until 5 am causes one to lose their creativity factor very fast”.
Here are some pics of the State Street windows:
This flower show was based on the art book for children, Linnea in Monet’s Garden, by Christina Bjork and Lena Anderson which was published in 1987. Lots of Spring blooms were used in this show to replicate Monet’s color filled garden including tulips, hyacinths, freesia, daffodils, scilla, wisteria, pussy willows and azaleas. Other plants included roses, hydrangeas, lavender, birch, citrus, weeping willow, flowering ornamental fruits, daises, pelargoniums and more.
More of the State Street windows:
The plants and flowers were all kept on the loading dock protected from the cold by a large tent with heaters inside. For most years I stayed on to maintain and freshen all the window displays – and those are some big windows. There was always an unwelcome blast of frigid air as you left the store and entered into the loading dock area. If it was 35 degrees the Chicago crew was crying “heat wave” and we coastal California wimps were whining “it’s freezing”! Anyway, I’m happy to say that every year the plants and people survived the whole production.
For those of you familiar with Marshall Field’s State Street this will take you on a trip down memory. Ahhh, such a classic store that was.
As some of you may know Marshall Fields is now Macy’s, much to the disdain of many Chicagoans. There will be many more posts of these Spring flower shows sometime in the future. Some of the themes include: Curious George, The Flower Fairies, another year of Monet’s garden and Provence in bloom.
