Center of Attention

With $50 and an Hour's Effort, Produce Never Looked So Good

Floral designers Stephen Chambers, Susan Vita and Sarah von Schrader (Renee Comet - For The Washington Post)

Amid the sprawling produce section of Super H Mart in Fairfax, Stephen Chambers is dangling a trio of Indian bitter melons at eye level. He doesn't care how they might taste. He intends to buy them because their deep green color and bumpy surface will complement seedless green grapes, lady apples and broccoli.

"They look alien, so cool," says Chambers, owner of Victorian Gardens floral design. "They look like something you'd find at the bottom of the ocean." And into the basket they go.

With Easter just days away, the Food section gave three Washington-area floral designers a budget and asked them to create a centerpiece using only fruits and vegetables. Like Chambers, Susan Vita of Lilac Lane Designs and Sarah von Schrader of Urban Petals are by-appointment-only, independent floral designers.

All three normally use fresh flowers in their arrangements. But they agreed to create an edible centerpiece in their individual styles to give readers ideas for designing arrangements at home.

Our florists supplied a vase or container as well as basic supplies such as floral foam, wire and wooden skewers, referred to in the trade as floral picks. For the fruits and vegetables, we chose Super H Mart, an Asian supermarket that is part of the Han Ah Reum chain with additional stores in Falls Church and Wheaton, because it has one of the largest selections of uncommon fruits and vegetables in the region.

The chili pepper selection catches von Schrader's attention, and she wastes no time, filling plastic bags with a collection of orange, lantern-shaped habaneros and red, twisting New Mexicans. "Right now, I'm grabbing textures and shapes. I'm not really sure what I'll do with it," she says. Known for her modern, minimalist designs in bold colors, von Schrader so far has amassed cactus leaves, mung bean sprouts, yard-long beans, a few stalks of rhubarb and a single pomelo -- a citrus that looks like an oversize grapefruit.

Nearby, Vita, noted for her English country garden-style arrangements, is working from a shopping list. She's particularly taken with the mountain of delicate pea shoots. "These would be perfect for a nest, and I know I'll have a nest somewhere," she says. Her cart is filling with small groupings of predominantly green fruits such as limes, grapes and unripe baby bananas that she plans to arrange with, among other things, a bundle of asparagus, Brussels sprouts and chrysanthemum greens.

Vita, who is chief of the Library of Congress Special Materials Cataloging division as well as a designer, looks for a "touch of lemon" and briefly considers a yellow/green star fruit before turning away. "I'm thinking it might be just too cutesy," she says.

With the shopping done, our florists have spent $50 each, on average. An hour later, a focused Chambers gets to work at a photo studio, filling a tall, glass, urn-shaped vase with green grapes and apples, as well as halved limes and kiwis with the cut sides against glass. On top goes a heavy, water-soaked block of floral foam the size of a child's lunchbox. It's the base for what he describes as his "lush and abundant, fruit and vegetable topiary inspired by Dutch still-life paintings."

With the aid of florists' wooden picks and wire, he drapes grapes over the exterior of the vase and finds space for his Indian bitter melons. One by one he secures mottled and blush-hued apples and pears in clusters atop the foam. In goes a broccoli bunch, an occasional white peach or mango. "What's Easter without a mango?" Chambers says. Holes are filled and picks hidden by crinkled tufts of spinach and downy leaves of sage.

The arrangement is so heavy that Chambers can barely move it. He would charge $250 for a display of this size -- more with the vase included.

On a smaller scale, Vita stacks three cake stands that are graduated in size, one atop another. With both hands working, she nudges her nearly all-green selections this way and that, often taking a few steps back to study the project.

"What you want to do is use picks to hold the fruits together so they won't roll around," she says. She also recommends a product called Leaf Shine, available at craft stores, that "cleans up foliage really well." When it comes time to assemble the "nest" on the top level, she creates a standing stalk of garlic shoots held in place with something called floral gum. On go the pea shoots and some kumquats. From her Lilac Lane Designs, the price would be about $160 without the cake plates.

A few feet away, von Schrader is taking her time, wiring together the New Mexican peppers so that they resemble the petals of an exotic flower. Red cabbage leaves are torn and wired together with baby bok choy atop a leek. A wild, floppy "flower" is pieced together with garlic chives, cactus leaves, yard-long beans and a small white potato. "The idea is to take somethingtypical and transform it," she says.

The whole business comes to rest in a tall, rectangular glass vase filled with slices of star fruit, lemon and a good-size carrot. The price would be $175, vase included.