A friend challenged me to write a story based on a phrase from a random word generator. My phrase was “harsh lily.” This is the result.

It was the opinion of most students at the Barrhead Flower Arranging Institute that no flower arranger’s course of education was truly complete without fighting at least one duel. The faculty and registrar of the institute naturally disavowed this tradition in their public statements, and no mention of it was made in official recruitment materials or the quarterly journal of the alumni association. But among those who earned the school’s coveted Certificate of Good Taste, the most respected were those whose reputations for balance of colour and gracefulness of line came paired with a slew of bested adversaries in bouts of fisticuffs and gentlemanly swordplay. These masters were referred to by their peers with the honorific “Harsh Lily.”

The title was first applied to Emmanuel Arboros, now recognized as the father of the neoclassical school of Central Albertan Ikebana.¹ For a generation, Arboros was virtually synonymous with the phrase; one could refer to the teachings of the great Harsh Lily, and others would simply understand you to mean Arboros. This remained the case until the arrival of Marigold Shen to Barrhead. 

Shen’s scores of acolytes regarded her as the enfant terrible that the Barrhead Institute needed to shake it out of a period of drab stoicism. Under the directorship of Arboros — then in the throes of his late-career foraging period — there was a serious vogue for weeds and twigs, which critics and audiences alike were beginning to find tiresome. Arboros had thus far fended off his most serious detractors with a well-honed bare-knuckle brawling technique. And while Shen’s fists had loosened many a tooth from its socket, she had begun to champion a brave new fighting style. Her most eminent biographer tells us that Shen’s primary innovation (aside from the reintroduction of the lilac into arrangements in the serialist style) was the use of a cutlass.²

It was ultimately this innovation that cost Arboros his mass esteem, and eventually his title at the Institute. As a mere student, without any taste certification to her name, Shen had the audacity to challenge the director of the school, and the skill to best him. Naturally, Arboros’s remaining defenders rallied around him, crying foul over Shen’s use of a non-regulation weapon in a fight on Institute property. But the rules of Harsh Lily duelling were as flexible as the principles of flower arrangement itself. And ultimately, no matter how many rematches the elderly Arboros demanded, he could not muster enough vigour to defeat such a young and ingenious opponent. The final Arboros/Shen duel even brought us the sad spectacle of Arboros attempting swordplay, a practice he had disdained since his days as an apprentice gardener.

By this time, even the most conservative voices in the floral theory community had abandoned Arboros. Irrelevant and alone, he had no choice but to resign the directorship.  After a brief and inconsequential stewardship by the minor classicist Rose Rosé, the directorship was passed on to Shen with great pomp and ceremony, almost immediately after her convocation.

It was around this time that the term “Harsh Lily” became democratized. Shen herself had taken up that sobriquet as a final blow to her defeated predecessor. In private, she encouraged her most gifted and violent students to do the same. They began to sign their letters with it, for example: “James Augustus Anthurium, Harsh Lily.” Anybody could bequeath the title on themselves, but it became a special honour at the Institute to have Director Shen herself refer to you by it. By most accounts, this is what precipitated the escalation of student violence that led to the massive proliferation of confirmed Harsh Lilies, and eventually to the outlawing of the Barrhead Institute by the king.

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Much has been made of the ephemeral nature of the Harsh Lilies’ masterpieces.³ Photographs cannot accurately represent their effect in three-dimensional space. They cannot be preserved in resin or lacquer without losing something of their sublime delicacy. Even the meticulous reconstructions of past masterworks being made in secret by contemporary florists cannot be taken as representative of the originals — however specific the artist’s notes may have been — because nature simply does not produce the same configuration of petals, leaves and stem twice (prohibitively expensive genetic engineering notwithstanding).

My opinion is that the entire tradition of legendary violence practiced by the Harsh Lilies stems (pardon the pun) from this fact. The urge to leave a mark on the world is a basic human impulse. To move through the world with the divine gifts of an Arboros or a Shen and to know nonetheless that your artistic legacy will not outlive you is a perverse fortune indeed. But, by expressing their frustration at their own impotence through the medium of punching, they ironically secured their legacies. For who among us doesn’t know these stories today?

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¹ Bellis-Perennis, Nicole: A Tree Among Flowers: The Life of Emmanuel Arboros
² Black, Dahlia: Marigold Shen: A Life in Bloom
³ To provide only a few of the most notable examples, Tulp, Aleta: The Withering Art; Frye, Flytrap: Sublime Decay; DeLion, Daniel: Compost.