The women dashed around the cathedral, pulling flowers from boxes, watering them and setting them aside for Liz Nielsen to decide where to put them.
For 35 years, Nielsen has been creating floral decorations for the Saint John’s Cathedral — she has a photo book to prove it — and despite retiring from duty twice, she was at it again Saturday ahead of the liturgy of the Easter Vigil.
“The heart of the Christian faith and life is the Resurrection,” Bishop Rob O’Neill said. “So this is our major celebration of the year. All the flowers and decorations of the cathedral are simply a way of underscoring both the beauty and joy of that.”
Nielsen, 76, creates floral decorations for the Episcopal cathedral year round with two or three helpers. But when it comes time for Christmas and Holy Week, the production is significantly bigger with 200 plants and seven to nine volunteers.
“You try to reflect that joy of the holiday with the beauty of nature,” Nielsen said of her Easter floral arrangements, which alternate between yellow and white one year and bright colors the next.
It’s not just the decorations that are bursting, it’s also the pews. The cathedral sees around 600 to 900 people on a typical Sunday. But come Easter, up to 3,000 people can fill the pews throughout the holiday’s services.
To prepare for the Easter Vigil, which takes place Saturday night, Nielsen and her volunteers come early that morning — before the Bishop and Dean arrive for rehearsal. The volunteers, which Nielsen is herself, don’t finish until about 1 p.m.
The display, which has the yellow and white theme this year, has lilies, daisies, pussy willows and other flowers intermixed with green plants. The flowers fill the front of the church and attach to the rood screen, a traditional decorative screen that separates the parishioners from the clergy. Nielsen created a floral tree and placed flower baskets in the aisle.
The flowers will stay up for Easter services as well as next week’s services. Nielsen said the flowers are a big production so the cathedral wants to get the most out of them. She’ll stop back in throughout the week, checking on the flowers and replacing a few.
Despite not being a professional florist, Nielsen knows what she’s doing. She recalls back to her school days as a young girl growing up in Germany when nuns taught her how to identify all kinds of flowers, bushes and trees. After doing the church flowers for a couple years, a family asked Nielsen to decorate their wedding. She said no, but the family insisted until she finally acquiesced. Now, she does weddings and funerals as well as the church.
“God gives you talents and you need to use them,” she said
For Nielsen, it’s important that the decorations are powerful for both the people in the front of the church as well as those in the back pews. Diane Cast, who runs the altar guild, said the flowers enhance the church, especially on special days such as Easter, instead of taking away from its English Gothic architecture.
Interim Dean Ronald Pogue said the cathedral tries to turn the church into a garden, harking back to the foundation of Easter when the Bible depicts women returning to Jesus’s tomb — which is surrounded by a garden — only to find it empty.
The Easter Vigil on Saturday night starts in darkness with light coming from candles. During the vigil, the Bishop proclaims “He is risen,” ushering in Easter. The lights in cathedral go up and the parishioners can see clearly for the first time as they’re surrounded by a garden of flowers.
