How Untamed Branches Are an Apt Symbol for Our Turbulent Times https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/t-magazine/branches.html How Untamed Branches Are an Apt Symbol for Our Turbulent Times Instead of the cool refinement of a simple bloom, they offer a more imposing and irrepressible sort of beauty. A monumental tangle of lichen-covered mountain laurel and flowering pink-and-white quince branches created by Emily Thompson of Emily Thompson Flowers in New York City.Credit...Photo by Kyoko Hamada. Set design by Theresa Rivera By Ligaya Mishan March 5, 2021 THE QUINCE ARE half-naked, half in flower. The blooms stand out bright white, points of focus in the broad dark, but the branches are the story: the anatomy of spiky boughs, and the angles and cantilevers they contorted themselves into during their life outdoors, reaching for the sun. Some of them are five feet high and set in their ways, resistant to the touch. “You’re wrestling a tiger,” says the New York-based floral designer Emily Thompson, who orchestrated this massing of flora — a vast organic architecture supported only by itself, without steel frames, and only a few zip ties to bind the joints — for the runway of the designer Jason Wu’s fall 2020 fashion show in Manhattan last February, just before the virus took hold of the city.