Flower power comes to Lompoc
LOMPOC — Sometimes treated like the rotten stepchild of the central coast,
Lompoc comes into its own in late June as the city dons a cape of colorful
petals and struts down Highway 1 like so many living coursages.
While other communities embrace rodeos, Santa Maria-style barbecue
and “Big Dogs,” Lompoc proudly celebrates its first legacy — flowers.
Long before missiles, a federal prison and multitudes of murals,
and now shopping centers, for which it is also famous, Lompoc’s fertile valley
was, and is, the place where thousands of acres are cultivated to grow flowers
and vegetables for market and seed stock.
The Lompoc Valley has approximately 45,000 acres of agricultural
land, according to the Santa Barbara County Office of Long Range Planning, and
has been dedicated to farming since the 1800s.
During the annual Flower Festival, all who love Lompoc come out
from wherever they are to eat, play carnival games and take rides, listen to
music, mingle and “just hang out” for five days in Ryon Park, in front of the
stage.
The Lompoc Valley Flower Association helps keep “flower power” alive by collecting parade entry
fees, which are used to buy the stock (mathiola) that is used to decorate the
traditional flower-covered floats in Lompoc’s annual parade. The parade wound
its way through town on June 28. Eighty percent of the surface of every float
in the parade must be covered with flowers and seeds.
Meeting this challenge are flower festival parade veterans Speed
Walton, Roger Nohrer, and James Mercer, who have it down to a science, so to
speak.
Since the glory of a fresh-cut flower is brief, the floats must be
created the day and night before the parade. These gentlemen organized 11 flower queen contestants, their
families and friends, members of the flower association and of the Elks and
Moose Lodges to create two of the main flower floats, the Elks’ “Jailhouse Rock”
and the Flower Festival Queen’s Float, on the theme, “Music, Music, Music.”
On the queens float, the queen and her court were poised on a set
of flower-covered stairs, like a band orchestra, with each having a separate
instrument, made out of grain. Guitars and saxophones cut out of styrofoam were
covered with brown and white rice, corn, wheat and onion seeds to create brown,
white, yellow and black.
The rest of the float was covered with panels of stock-covered
sections in light purple, purple, magenta and white.
Stock (mathiola), a hardy flower, is the traditional flower used
for floats in the Lompoc parade. To create these two floats, James Mercer,
flower chairman for the past four years, calculated that 212 buckets of white
stock, 73 buckets of light purple, 70 of purple, 64 of burgundy and 62 of peach
were needed to cover the 2,185 combined square feet of surfaces on the two
floats.
The Lompoc Flower Festival had a record 11 girls competing this
year for the title of Flower Festival Queen.
They all showed their spirit hands-on with friends and family in
the Elks Lodge parking lot on Ocean Avenue, decorating the floats the afternoon
and night before the parade.
“We had to
modify our design to accommodate the 11 flower girls,” parade assistant Nohrer
said. “Originally, I had a grand piano on the top, but since we ended up with
11 contestants who all qualified, we modified the design to have a
three-dimensional piano sticking out of the side of the float so that all the
ladies would fit.”