Yellow Green Pompom Mum

About ninety seconds. The yellow green pompom mum has a keyhole mount on the back — you put a screw in the wall, hang the keyhole over it, and you are done. No drill required for most walls. No bracket, no frame, no level required if your eye is reasonably reliable. The flower hangs flat against the wall and stays there. We have been building them this way since 1999 and the system has never needed an update, which is the highest possible endorsement of a hanging system.

The chrysanthemum means longevity, joy, and the specific kind of optimism that arrives in autumn when most of the garden has made its position on the coming cold very clear. In Japanese culture it is one of the most significant flowers — a symbol of the imperial family, of long life, of the beauty that persists. In the West it has come to mean the dependable flower, the one that shows up when others have given up. The yellow green version has made that commitment in the color of beginnings, which is either ironic or hopeful, and we have decided it is hopeful.

The Yellow Green Pompom Mum is a thank-you gift for someone who has a wall. It is handmade ceramic from a studio that has been making things since 1999. It is in the collection of the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens. It ships gift-ready in Chive packaging. A thank-you gift that goes on a wall is a gift that thanks them every time they walk past it, which is a return on the sentiment that most thank-you gifts — cards, flowers that last a week, boxes of things to consume — do not provide. This one earns its place.

The fifteenth anniversary is traditionally associated with crystal, which is transparent and fragile and not very exciting. The Yellow Green Pompom Mum is ceramic — handmade, designed in Toronto, in the collection of the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens. It is opaque and durable and very exciting. It hangs on one screw. It ships gift-ready. It will be on the wall at the twentieth anniversary, looking exactly as it does now, which is a quality crystal generally cannot match without careful handling.

The sunroom is the room with the most light, and most wall decor does not understand what to do with a lot of light. Ceramic glaze changes in strong light — it catches and releases differently than paint or paper, showing the texture of the application, the depth of the color. The Yellow Green Pompom Mum in strong sunroom light is a different object than it is in a hallway. The yellow green intensifies. The sphere becomes more clearly three-dimensional. The glaze shows the hand that applied it. A sunroom is the right room for a ceramic flower.

Eclectic interiors are where ceramic wall flowers do their best work. The eclectic approach — collected, layered, assembled from different eras and sources — requires objects with a material character and a clear point of view. The Yellow Green Pompom Mum is handmade ceramic from a studio operating since 1999, in the collection of the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. It has a point of view. It reads as found or collected rather than purchased, which is the quality eclectic interiors most value. In a room that already has depth and variety, a single ceramic pompom mum in yellow green is the thing everyone asks about.

The Yellow Green Pompom Mum ships in Chive packaging — a box sized for the flower, with tissue. It is ready to give without additional wrapping. If you are shipping directly to the recipient, it will arrive looking like a gift. If you are giving it in person, you are already ready. The packaging is designed not to be the problem, which is a low bar we clear consistently. The flower is the gift. The packaging supports it without drawing attention to itself.

Most flowers managed to avoid this. The pompom mum did not, which we respect. It had the form, the density, the spherical completeness of something that could be waved enthusiastically, and botanists or breeders or someone along the way noticed this and named it accordingly. We have considered whether the name undermines the flower's dignity. The flower has never indicated it is bothered. We have decided to follow the flower's lead on this.