Emily Mortimer and the Common Dahlias

When actress Emily Mortimer was growing up in London, her father, playwright Sir John Mortimer, told her the stories of the Mitford sisters. The six aristocratic siblings were raised in isolation in the English countryside, where they developed a private language called Boudledidge, and they led adventurous lives in the interwar years. Nancy and Diana are part of the trendy set The Bright Young Things, and another sister, Unity, befriends Hitler. My father often spoke of this family of fascinating and extreme women, two of whom were allied with the Fascist Party, two of whom were allied with the Communist Party, and one of whom was a Duchess, Mortimer recalled recently. He actually knew Jessica Mitford, the Communist, and I remember she used to come to lunch when I was very young.

In 1945, Nancy Mitford fictionalized her eccentric upbringing and romantic misadventures in her novel The Pursuit of Love, which Mortimer discovered as a teenager. She’s now adapted it into a whimsical BBC miniseries (it aired on Amazon Prime last week), starring Lily James as a thrill-seeking newbie. But don’t expect bloated violins: Mortimer, who also directed, gave the series an anachronistic soundtrack that includes The Tiger, Sleater-Kinney, and T. Rex. I just think he’s got a bit of a punk-rock soul, this book, she said as she walked through Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband, actor Alessandro Nivola. She had just passed in front of the restaurant where she spent days working on the script. She remembered: A waiter came up to me at one point and said: Have you finished your universe map yet?

A key to the Mitford universe: flowers. Jessica Mitford, in her memoir, Hons and Rebels, from 1960, recalled that her mother, educating girls in home economics, once offered a half-crown prize to the child who could produce the best. budget for a young couple living over 500 a year; but Nancy ruined the contest by starting her expense list with Flowers … 490. Mortimer took the line for The Pursuit of Love. I remember my dad quoting this from Jessica’s book, she said. She reached a small house in Cobble Hill and rang the bell. In the spirit of aristocratic recreation, Mortimer had enrolled in a private flower arrangement course at something called Fleur Elise Bkln. The door opened: Fleur Elise Bkln turned out to be the home of Elise Bernhardt, a woman in her sixties with a salt and pepper pixie cut. She led Mortimer into a rambling backyard.

Bernhardt began teaching the class in 2018, she said, after a trip to Japan that exposed her to ikebana, a classic form of flower arrangement. The Ikebana is very precise, which is why I am studying it, because I am not, she explained. She started by asking her student to share a memory related to flowers. My dad loved gardening and he had this big display of dahlias, recalls Mortimer. I remember his first wife passing by the garden to visit him. I must have been a little girl, and my dad said: Don’t dahlias look wonderful? And she went, It’s a very vulgar flower. Mortimer’s face fell, as he had done back then.

Moving on, Bernhardt, who ran a nonprofit dance organization, said: Let me introduce you to our characters here because, really, you’re doing a dance in a vase. Lined up in bins were the dramatis personae: gerbera daisies, alstroemerias, leucadendrons, thistles, cubs, guillaume. Bernhardt asked Mortimer to choose a vase, she chose a chipped Tunisian pitcher that Bernhardt had found in a flea market and said: I want you to decide who is the star of your show.

Mortimer selected celosia, a tousled, tousled flower that Bernhardt said looked like brains, but reminded Mortimer of petticoats. Bernhardt told him to start with three. You want asymmetrical things to leave room for negative space. By the way, she added, the star of the show might not be the star of the show.

Mortimer, an actress of character, seemed delighted. (In The Pursuit of Love, she introduced herself as the Bolter, the fickle, monogamous-phobic mother of the protagonists.) Bernhardt made a few rules: vary the length of the stems so that the flowers are not at a height uniform, and get rid of the leaves, especially the uglier ones. No ugliness, she said, tearing a leaf from one of Mortimer’s celosias and throwing it in the bushes. Or, as my ikebana teacher would say, Sayonara!

Next: the support players. Mortimer added hypericums and peonies, filling his jug to the hilt. Maybe I went a little too far, she said.

Perfection is overrated, Bernhardt assured him, adding, I want to suggest that you take a few more sheets.

I guess minimalism isn’t my strong suit, as my TV show will show you, Mortimer said, with a quiet laugh. After cutting a few leaves and adding one more peony, she was done. Her arrangement, like The Pursuit of Love, was a quirky period piece: petticoats and punk. Mortimer thanked his instructor and took his creation to the streets. He suffers a little from excess, she said. But I love this.