Skip to main content

Tulips & Lilies for the Holy Name of Mary: Latin Mass Altar Flowers

For the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost and the feast of the Holy Name of Mary, the parish where we formerly held the Traditional Latin Mass, asked me to do flowers for their 25th Anniversary Celebration.  This was an opportunity to do some TLM outreach.  Anyone who runs in traditional circles, understands the continual need to work to keep everything congenial in a small Catholic community.  I was honored to do flowers on this special day.  Fortunately, two very talented ladies volunteered to do the flowers at our regular TLM parish, so this freed me up to focus on St. Mary's Church.  


Our local bulb farm, once again, generously donated lilies and tulips for the occassion. Before starting the arrangements I picked up a dozen white roses and found a field of Queen Anne's lace to forage.  The bulb farm donated some (gigantic!) pink lilies, white lilies and soft pink tulips. For greenery I cut fir, cedar, ivy, hydrangea, laurel and pittosporum.  
Before working with tulips, I strongly recommend you read my post on arrangements for the First Solemn High Mass reception and watch Michael Gaffney's  video on how to prepare tulips so they don't grow out of your arrangements!
The altar guild requested a large arrangement to go in front of the table altar and two more for the pedestals to the sides of the tabernacle.  


I had only just watched a Michael Gaffney  video where one of his students designed a dutch flemish centerpiece.  This was the inspiration for the semicircular arrangement at the base of the statue of Our Lady.  

Ready to transport



Ave Maria!







Comments

  1. Beautiful! I'm so sorry I wasn't able to participate and see them in person.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lovely! I especially liked the light pink tulips.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. So do I, they are worth the work! I would never had thought to use them if the bulb farm hadn't generously donated them. Thank you, Marie-Jacqueline!

      Delete
  3. These are really lovely.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roses for Our Lady: Altar Flowers for the Nativity of the BVM

Altar flowers for the Traditional Latin Mass Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.   Roses, Queen Anne's lace, green poms and crocosmia greens.

Processional Litter & Flowers for the Feast of the Assumption

This year for the Feast of the Assumption, the pastor of our little country parish asked if I would help create a processional litter for the statue of Our Lady.    He had the great idea of repurposing an old table!  It seemed Our Lady was smiling down on me that day when I walked into the thrift store and there it was for twenty dollars: a perfect square, three foot, solid oak table. A few months ago, my kind friend, mentor, and owner of Altarations Paraments in Oregon sent me a box loaded with remnants of liturgical fabric.  I added a white skirt around the bottom to hide the table legs and a carpenter attached brackets for the removable oak rods.  I was a bit nervous about creating the arrangements for the litter. They needed to be as light as possible and secured to the litter to withstand being jostled about in the procession.   I found four plastic oval platters at the dollar store, added a block of wet foam, taped it in place and created the arr...

Hydrangeas, Roses & Holly: Altar Flowers for Christmas

                      Unfortunately, this is the best picture I could get of the arrangements for the Latin Mass on Christmas Day.   However, it may serve as inspiration for what can be done in the most unlikely of spaces.   The architecture of the church is typical postmodern, with no vestiges of the past.  The crucifix was added and the tabernacle put in its rightful place only within the last d ecade.  Who would have thought that the Latin Mass would be making its debut here in our isolated, rural community when there are a handful of beautiful, century-old churches perfectly designed for the purpose not far away! The proliferation of fake poinsettias already present in the church set me in motion to find other examples of possibilities for the traditional altar.  My search led me to the liturgy guy's post Does this 1944 Christmas Eve Mass Look Anything Like Yours?   I was inspired by the...