This year I was able to fill a life-long dream of seeing the Rose Parade in person and a florist’s dream of actually working on one of the floats! It was truly an unforgettable experience, and I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything else like it. Today I’ll share some of the behind-the-scenes work on my float plus some of my favorite floats from the parade itself.
If you aren’t familiar with the parade, then I’ll give a small bit of background. The parade is held every New Years Day in Pasadena, California. It is unique among parades because every float must be 100% covered in plant material. This is often fresh flowers, but could also be dried materials such as grasses, beans, or seeds. It could mean entire plants, like one float who cut entire Christmas trees and added them. The detail work is absolutely incredible. One of my favorites from the other floats was this mushroom made out of cranberries:
Work on the parade floats begins almost immediately after the parade finishes in the new year with initial design and then building of the mechanics. Many of the floats have pieces that move or other special effects, plus they have to be able to drive 5 miles down the streets of Pasadena, so this takes months of planning and precise design.
Since I don’t live in Pasadena, but many miles away in Nashville, I did not come in until the weekend before the parade, when the designers start adding the flowers. This was where my work as a florist came in handy. I spent hours and hours cutting and stripping roses to be placed in water tubes which would eventually form the base of the float.
While I was stripping roses, other volunteers began by working with the dried materials. These last longer than fresh flowers, so they go on the float first. I loved these dodo birds made out of pampas grass and colorful beans and seeds.
In the last few days designers and volunteers work around the clock to add the fresh flowers and finish the float in time for judging the day before the parade. The final product for our float was this Dodo Bird Flight School float:
Our float was awesome, but there were certainly many more that I loved, and I just have to share a few here.
The theme of the parade this year was Hope, and in my mind one of the best floats that captured this theme was the giant floral phoenix. Any Harry Potter fan knows that the phoenix is a mythical creature that is reborn again after it dies. Early Christian writers took this pagan idea and re-purposed it as a symbol of the resurrection of Christ and our own rebirth after death, which to me is the greatest Hope of all.
Another of my favorites was the Wizard of Oz float. One thing you may not know about me is that I love the Oz books by Frank Baum. There are 14 of them, and even though they are children’s books, they remain my absolute favorite books ever. You can tell that the cowardly lion on the float is from the books rather than the movie because he has his glasses from the original artwork:
Pretty much anyone can create a float in the Rose Parade. Some contributions are cities, such as the La Canada Flintridge float that I worked on. Some are non-profit organizations, and their participation in the parade helps to spread their message. Others are businesses that we all know and recognize. I really liked this submission from Chipotle:
Since I was making the long trip out to Pasadena for the parade, I brought my husband and we made a week out of it. Of course we had to do some of the touristy things, and one of our stops was Huntington Library and gardens. Well, one of the floats made a recreation of the garden that was absolutely marvelous:
They recreated the cacti from the garden that my husband loved so much. Since we’re in the South, we had never seen anything like this before. The cactus is truly a recreation. It was so lifelike that I totally got up close to check that they didn’t just chop them out of their garden.
Huntington Library holds an original illustrated copy of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which as a bookworm I totally geeked out over. The float recreated this well, too:
Speaking of bookworms….
Are you completely tired of my Rose Parade photos yet? I could share them all day. It was one of the most amazing things to see these wonders up close, and I will for sure be doing this again someday! Here’s a few more to wrap up:
