I'm afraid most of you are right. If I want flowers by my barn, I'd better get silk ones. Or maybe have hanging baskets or something that can be moved out of reach for when the horses are turned out nearby.
Which brings me to the subject of today's post: how and where to get free silk flowers for your jumps. The short answer: from a cemetery maintenance crew. With permission. (I'm not suggesting grave robbing here. I'm suggesting that you ask for the flowers that they would otherwise throw away.)
I used to work in an office across the street from a huge perpetual care cemetery. What perpetual care meant in this case is that all the grave markers were set flat into the ground so that the whole area could be mowed. Only certain flower containers were allowed, so if people wanted to put flowers on the grave, the only choice was to use silk flowers.
Whenever there would be a big storm, these silk flowers would take flight and blow across the street. They would mound up outside of my office window, which went all the way to the ground. There's nothing much sadder that a pile of wet silk flowers blown off of graves. I grew to hate the sight of them. A few weeks ago I drove down that street after our big wind storms and saw that there were silk flowers impaled in fences and other places where they had blown from the cemetery. It happens so regularly and seems so grotesque that it's like a Hitchcock movie that never got made. (Maybe the fact that I would sometimes see open caskets from my office window makes not be able to see these flowers-turned-trash as nothing more than flowers-turned-trash. They're ugly, sad trash escaped from the grave where they were placed by people who are missing someone they love.)
But one enterprising stable owner has developed a relationship with the maintenance people at the cemetery. After big storms when the flowers have blown all over the place, the maintenance people don't know which flowers go where, so they throw them all away (like they'd put them back, but that's another story). So this stable owner gets as many as she wants to use for decorating her jumps. It works for her. It's a good way to recycle something bound for the landfill. And there's an endless, endless supply.







