Flora at the Worcester Art Museum: How a Medieval Chapter House Became a Garden
By Sam Paradis | Sam's Stems - Floral Boutique
The Space: A Room With a Story
Before a single flower was chosen, there was a room to understand.
The Chapter House at the Worcester Art Museum is no ordinary gallery space. It originated at the Benedictine Priory of Saint John Le Bas-Nueil in west central France, disassembled stone by stone and rebuilt here in 1933, the first medieval edifice reconstructed in an American museum. When I was given the opportunity to install a floral piece here, the history of this room didn't just inform the work. It became the work.
Walking into it for the first time, I was struck by how alive it felt for a room made of stone. There is something about old architecture that holds memory in a way modern spaces simply don't, the arches remember being arched, the walls remember standing in France. To work inside a space like this isn't just a creative opportunity; it's a kind of conversation across centuries. I felt, standing there, the particular weight of being trusted with something irreplaceable.
The Concept: What If the Garden Came Back?
Every installation begins with a question. Mine was this: what if, hidden away and forgotten before being brought brick by brick to Worcester, a few pieces of art had been stored and abandoned in this room and over time, the garden began to bleed out of the canvas?
I kept returning to the image of abandonment. Not neglect exactly, but the quiet kind of leaving that happens when life moves on faster than we can carry everything with us. Paintings half-finished, left leaning against one another on easels. Not failures; interruptions. There is something unbearably human about an unfinished work of art. It implies a life that continued beyond it. It implies feelings so large they couldn't be contained.
How long had it been growing? Does it speak to the persistence of nature, always finding its way? Flowers are an art medium, and what I feel reflects my voice, or what I can't express in words, I communicate through them. The unfinished works lead me to wonder who made them. What was the final intention? Was this a gardener, a flower lover, someone who began these paintings out of obsession or grief or love? Why were they left behind, unfinished, not brought with the artist? And did that feeling - whatever it was - bleed so deeply into the artwork that the art began to come out of the canvas, unable to be held by its confines?
That became the soul of this piece. Flowers reclaiming a space.
What draws me to flowers as a medium is precisely this, their refusal to be still. Paint dries. Stone holds its shape for centuries. But flowers are always in the middle of becoming something else, and that tension between beauty and impermanence, between blooming and letting go, is where I feel most at home as a designer. If a painted garden bled through a canvas and into a real room, it would not emerge as something tidy. It would arrive the way feeling arrives: sideways, searching, overwhelmingly alive.
This idea also connects deeply to where I see floral design heading in 2026. Meadow-style ground pieces, wild and natural arrangements, intimate and personal spaces; these are the trends shaping wedding and event design right now, and they speak directly to my own creative voice. The deeper I dig into a space, the stronger the connection I feel to it, and the more the work pulls itself toward something real.
The Rules: Protecting the Art Above Everything
Working inside a museum comes with a responsibility that reshapes everything; your mechanics, your flower choices, your final vision. The number one rule: protect the art.
Every space has its own rules, and learning to respect them pushes you toward solutions you wouldn't have found otherwise. I find that creatively freeing. This is something I think about in my wedding and event work too; every venue has restrictions, and honoring them isn't a limitation, it's part of the design. With that in mind, we avoided placing any flowers on the walls or pillars, and eliminated all open water sources to protect the surrounding pieces.
There's a kind of reverence that comes over you when you work inside a museum. You become acutely aware of your hands, of where you're stepping, of the weight of the things around you. Art that has survived centuries deserves that awareness. In a strange way, I think that heightened attention made the work better, it slowed me down, made every placement deliberate. Constraint is one of the most honest creative teachers I know.
The Mechanics: Building the Base
Great floral work starts long before the first stem is cut. It starts with a sketch.
I always want to envision a strong foundation before anything else, the structure that will hold the whole piece together invisibly. For this installation, that meant a flat board cut into a one-foot square, a bowl planter, floral foam (which elegantly solved the no-open-water rule), chicken wire, and reusable zip ties.
There's a parallel here to the room itself. All that history, all that meaning, held up by stone and mortar that most visitors never think about. The foundation doesn't need to be seen to be essential. I want the flowers to feel inevitable, like they couldn't have landed anywhere else, and that only happens when what's underneath them is solid and considered.
Common mechanics I work with include chicken wire, floral foam, tape, and eco-friendly alternatives depending on the project. Choosing the right one for the space is its own creative decision, and using these bases allows me to reuse the majority of the components while giving the flowers room to push through the canvas naturally.
The Flowers: A Language of Their Own
One of my favorite parts of any installation is the research. I love looking up what flowers mean, what they've symbolized across cultures and throughout history; a whole silent language passed between people through petals, carrying messages that couldn't be spoken aloud.
For this piece, the flowers used include:
Osmunda regalis (Royal Fern) — tranquility
Laceflower — sanctuary, safety, refuge
Allium — unity
Thistle — resilience
Clematis — mental beauty, ingenuity
Jewels of Opar — prosperity
Aster — wisdom
Carnation — love, admiration
Limonium (Sea Lavender) — remembrance, sympathy, success
Tree Fern — survival
Bear Grass — strength, connection to the earth
Sword Fern — sincerity
Leatherleaf — protection
Lepidium — resilience
Yarrow — healing, courage
They may not always align perfectly with the occasion, but they add a layer of intention that I find deeply satisfying, a private conversation between the designer and the flowers.
When I look at the full list, what strikes me is how much of it is about endurance. Resilience, survival, strength, protection; these aren't the soft, romantic words people expect from flowers. But they feel right for this space, for this time. A room that was taken apart and rebuilt. Paintings that were left behind and outlasted their makers. Flowers that grew, were cut, traveled across the country and the world, and still arrived with something to say. This piece is quiet, but I hope it is also loud. It is desperate in the way that love is desperate, it wants good, it reaches for good, it refuses to stop believing in good even when the world makes that difficult. Beauty has always been an act of resistance. Tending a garden, painting a canvas, gathering people into a room and surrounding them with flowers; these are not small things. They are the way humans have always said: we are still here, we still care, and we will keep making beautiful things.
A Love Letter
This show is a love letter to the people I love, and to everything I love.
From planning to prepping to processing to delivery to install, this piece has been touched by so many hands that care about flowers and about bringing people together. The friends, family, and loved ones who contribute to making Flora happen are irreplaceable. And even beyond that, when I think about the journey these flowers have been on - from growth to picking to packaging to delivery to finally landing in my hands, it makes me appreciate and love the process even more.
Art has always been how people reach across time toward each other, teaching and reminding us, or simply expressing that what we feel has been felt by humans throughout history. That we are not alone in our joy, our grief, our longing, our resistance. The monks who built the original Chapter House, the painter who left their canvas unfinished, the farmers who grew these flowers without ever knowing where they would end up, all of them are part of this piece. And so is everyone who walks into this room and feels something they couldn't quite name before they arrived. That's what moves me most about working at the intersection of nature and art: nothing is ever truly made alone. Everything is inherited, passed forward, and transformed by whoever holds it next. Community is not just who stands beside you, it's everyone who came before you and made it possible to stand at all.
I hope what you feel when you stand in front of this piece is exactly that. And I hope you get close, there are some interesting details in where the flowers are growing from. It also makes for a pretty great photo backdrop, just saying.
Thank you to every single person on the Flora team, to the incredible team at WAM, and to my parents, siblings, boyfriend, and best friend. I love you all beyond words and flowers.
— Sam