Flower Power
By Professor Spellbinder

I begin by apologizing to those of you who love feather flowers. This article is not about feather flowers. Personally, I have never liked feather flowers because they simply do NOT look like real flowers. They look like colorful feather dusters.

Having gotten that out of my system, I will next go after cheap imitation flowers. It’s not about how much they cost, it’s about plastic flowers that look like they are made of plastic. You should be able to put a real flower next to a good imitation flower and have trouble telling the two apart. If you can take one glance and tell which is real and which is the artificial flower, the artificial is good only for practice and rehearsal.

You should always strive to use genuine flowers in live performances. People really CAN tell the difference and when they discover that you are doing magic with genuine live flowers, they will have more respect for you as a magician.

Leafing through any Magic Store catalog, I find the following tricks involving flowers. Most of these involve either feather flowers or spring flowers, that wonderful invention of Bautier De Kolta which has become so overused, it is almost a stereotype of the hack magician. Spring flowers, with apologies to Bautier De Kolta who handmade his to look more realistic than the ones available in today's magic stores, look like what they are- tissue paper imitations. I show you how you can convert the phoney looking flowers into more realistic looking blossoms.

What they sell

What you can turn them into

Almost every effect in the list is capable of being performed using real live flowers if you are interested in doing so, or at least by using more realistic plastic or silk flowers from the Dollar Store or Craft Store, and I will explain how to do so in this article.

Botania or the Growth of Flowers § Cane or Candle to Bouquet § Color Changing Flower § Crystal Flower Tube § Drooping Flower § Fire Bowl to Flowers ¥ Flower in Buttonhole Flowers From Fingertips ¥ Garden of Flowers § Gloves to Bouquet ¥ Match to Flower Pot of Flowers ¥ Repeat Flower Wand § Silk to Flower Sleeve Bouquets § Vanishing Flower Pot – Delage §	A Botania can be made with artificial or real flowers using Robert Harbin's clever solution.
§ = Usually manufactured with feather flowers (the symbol sort of looks like a feather) ¥ = Usually manufactured with spring flowers (that one is kind of like a spring flower)

Here are some flower illusions from our own Wizards’ Journals. Note: these use realistic artificial flowers or genuine live flowers.

Step On It by Eleazar Goodenough (Wiz J #9)
Crazy Daisy by me! (Wiz J #11) – Just exchange the plush daisy for a real bouquet.

From Jim Gerrish’s Hardboard and Duct Tape Magic
Production Tubes – It ends with the production of a vase of real or realistic flowers.
Genii Tube – Jim explains how to use with realistic silk flowers.

So far, our Magic Nook output has not been very impressive in the Floral Department, but the addition of this article is intended to rectify that in one swell foop…. er… fell swoop.

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