Feral, Verdant, Romantic and Ethereal: Mikey Putnam’s Walk through the Cosmos has been a Gift to Us All

The facts are strange. Our Earth is a largish dirt-covered rock, adrift in an endless, freezing vacuum and handily located next to an enormous lamp which ceaselessly dumps life-enabling energy onto our hills, valleys, and fleabag motels. For about 430 million years our dirt-covered rock has been busily sprouting a kingdom of living flora whose thankless role has been singular: to turn the sun’s energy into stuff that can be eaten. While the workings of Nature are plainly mechanical, for reasons unknown to us (but wildly theorized by theologians and poets), this grandly anointed “Plant Kingdom” exhibits a nearly hallucinogenic variety of gorgeous colors and textures, “…[a] view that seems to want to be seen” as a lovely old Peggy Lee song puts it. This cornucopia of stirring beauty was likely not much appreciated by the roaming beasts that, for eons, blankly ate the stuff for sustenance.

When the human race finally showed up – with its opposable thumbs, proto-language, and not-terribly-impressive cave paintings of poorly drawn bison being hassled by stick figures – the news was good. Here at last was a creature capable of being deeply stirred by the ineffable. Certain of these human creatures would prove sensitive to the emotive power of the plant kingdom’s complex beauty and, more significantly, to the fact of beauty itself. Mikey?

“When I was younger and living with my aunts in Santa Barbara,” says Mikey Putnam, “they always had a crazy garden. They would grow these six-foot tall cosmo flowers, and I just remember wandering through the cosmos in their garden – Alice in Wonderland in a little forest of flowers. It was something that I was always drawn to. I would pick little flowers with roots out of the ground at the Wilcox property and plant them in my aunts’ yard. I was just obsessed with flowers my whole life.”

Michael Putnam Designs. To Say the Least.

Mikey Putnam is a globally renowned artist who takes as his medium the petals, leaves, stems (and lesser-known botanical ephemera) that leap out of the topsoil and beg to be exalted. He and his crew travel the world, leading workshops, glorifying weddings, and designing heart-seizing installations. As a teen, he lived for a time in Okinawa. “My time there shaped my idea of florals, my idea of composition. Seeing Ikebana, seeing the varieties – just seeing the patience that people put into florals there; it’s really embracing the natural shape of the flower, embracing what it is and not trying to fight against it.” The guy means it. 

Putnam’s genius, or intuition, is to give every floral element in an arrangement its soliloquy. The perceptual spaces around his flowers showcase the starkly beautiful eruptions than can give his arrangements the anarchic elegance for which he’s known. Mikey Putnam’s “flower arranging” is a delicate mimicry of the bounteous bursting forth of the plant kingdom – of life itself. 

His website Putnam Designs offers a summary glimpse of what he does, and for whom; his portfolio there a cornucopious scrapbook of his work for clients like Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Martha Stewart, Cartier, and a young newlywed with the unusual name Gwyneth. His Putnam Flowers Instagram account is a garden of unearthly delights with 361,000 adoring followers. 

Since around 2014 Putnam’s polite dismissal of floral arranging’s established order (such as it was) has captured a massive following, to whom his combinatorial intuitions represent a startling and ongoing evolution in the art form. “My work is very wild, very organic, very feral,” he says. Okay, but success on this scale, driven solely by this fractious world’s communal love of beauty, gives rise to three questions. “How? How? How?” 

Okinawa to City College to Manhattan 

“I grew up in Santa Barbara most of my life, on and off. After Japan I moved to Santa Barbara and I lived with my aunt and her wife here. They’ve lived there for 50 years.” Nineteen-year-old Mikey Putnam returned to the States at loose ends but soon figured out what he thought he wanted. “I started to go to Santa Barbara City College, and I was there for two years, and I transferred to FIT.” FIT is NYC’s Fashion Institute of Technology. Not to be confused with MIT. “They have one of the best interior design programs in the world,” Putnam says. “I loved textiles, I loved furniture, I loved space, I loved transforming space. It was always something that I had such a passion for. And as a creative, I thought that it was a career that I could definitely excel in.” 

He plowed through school, the arguable glamor of interior design tamped somewhat by its manifestation as homework. “The last year of my studies at FIT, I was kind of in the middle of my thesis. I really started to pick up floral design as a hobby just because I loved it. I always had a connection to flowers.” Putnam got a job in a furniture store to help put himself through school. 

“This designer from Kravitz would come in to just get stuff for their projects. And she was like, would you ever want to intern?” Putnam grins ruefully. “I thought it was that Kravitz, as in the textile company? She brought me into the office,” he laughs, “and then I realized it was Lenny Kravitz. He has an interior design firm in New York. It’s called Kravitz Design…” Over a couple years, what started as an internship turned into a job.

“I was going to school and working there basically. And I realized that, you know what? I need to do something with my hands. I need to be creative. I was tired of being on a computer, I’m very tactile. I decided to just pick up flowers.” This smallish whim would, as they say, change the course of Putnam’s life. “On the weekends I would play with flowers. I’d go to the flower market in New York, and I would just play and I would take photos of my work. I started a silly little Instagram…” When his boss, the Rock G*d Lenny Kravitz, noticed Putnam’s floral proclivities, he was supportive.

…it was like, hello from Vogue…

“Lenny would start sending me on little runs to deliver flowers to some of his clientele. His firm would be like, can you make an arrangement and send it to this person or this person?” Putnam threw himself at flowers in his spare time, posting to Instagram, creating for Kravitz’ clients. Several months of this and the Fates came bumbling in like giddy, loveable drunks. 

“I remember waking up one morning, this was nine months into doing flowers, and I get this email from Vogue. And it was like, hello from Vogue! And they wanted me to do this little editorial project with them.” Putnam still sounds flabbergasted. A little. “I was so nervous. I was freaking out! I was like, ‘Is this real? I don’t know what this is!’” More or less the same reaction you or I have when Vogue calls, dear reader. “So I did it, obviously.” What that first gig lacked in glamor it more than made up for in Destiny announcing itself like a fireball tearing through the ceiling and setting fire to the couch. I’ll have to give Putnam the floor here. Yeah, a Smart Car figures in this origin story.

“I was living in New Jersey and I had a little Smart Car, and I would drive my Smart Car to school, and then I would drive my Smart car to Kravitz’ design firm, which was in Soho. Or in the mornings I would go and hit the flower market. But I remember making that arrangement for Vogue in the back of my Smart Car. It was in the middle of a blizzard in Times Square when the Vogue offices were there, and it was almost white-out conditions. And I was just freezing! Making this little arrangement in the back of my Smart Car with the back popped up.”

Bloomin’ History

The rest is you-know-what. Today Putnam conducts workshops in Southeast Asia, Europe, Central America, Japan, Korea, China. And so on. Yeah, we’re still talking flower arranging. In Putnam Designs’ offshore work, though, they are adding full design services, too. 

Phaidon Press, iconic publisher of beautiful books on art, architecture, design and fashion, have published two color-soaked tomes by Putnam: the best-selling Flower Color Guide and Flower Color Theory. These are the sorts of resplendent, functional books you see in museum bookstores, and, like, everywhere else. 

Mikey Putnam’s gift is an organic outgrowth of his own deep instincts about (and frank infatuation with) beauty – his loving and visionary sense of how best to capture and optimize the gorgeous stuff that surrounds us and swaddles the world. His floral expressionism is beloved across the planet. Or as his website states in buttoned-down business patter, Putnam Designs is a creative floral and design studio headquartered in New York City with extensive experience on projects both domestic and abroad. Cool enough, and Mikey Putnam is still headed for his zenith. But the real sparks fly in the opening chapters of self-discovery. Beginnings are fraught, and lovely.

“I had a small team. We were poor, but we just loved what we did. Four or five years in we started getting more celebrity clientele, and we got asked to do Gwyneth and Cher’s weddings…” He sighs. And who wouldn’t? Life, apparently, favors the mad leap. And mad leaps, even as they continue bearing fruit, spur warming reminiscence. 

“I was so young, and I was having fun, and it was chaotic, and I was all over the city, here and there meeting all these really cool people.” Putnam looks at me with impossibly piercing blue eyes. Just sayin’. 

“It was New York, and it was fun and crazy and tiring. And it was awesome.”