By Claire Bush

Most folks are content to slow down as they approach 80, but 79-year-young Vera Arnold’s green thumb is now blossoming into a thriving business.

Forty years ago, Arnold was introduced Ikebana, the Japanese art of floral arrangement, and from the start it was a love affair. Today, the Tempe woman not only creates her own striking floral arrangements, she teaches the art to others and is now marketing her expertise via a just-released DVD.

While stationed in Tachikawa Air Force base on the outskirts of Tokyo with her husband, Rick, in the late 1950s, Arnold spent every spare moment soaking up the Japanese culture.

“A very talented Japanese woman came and gave Ikebana classes at the service club one day,” she recalls. “I just took to it from the start.” 

She soon enrolled in a teacher certification course so she could share her art with others.

After returning to the United States in 1963, Arnold and her husband moved to Tempe, where she worked in civil service and then owned a secretarial agency, continuing to work on her flower arranging in spare moments. The hobby moved from an avocation to a career in the 1990s, when Arnold opened an Ikebana studio in Scottsdale adjacent to her secretarial business.

“Ikebana speaks to my soul; it flows so beautifully with nature,” says Nan Holt, a former student of Arnold’s who has had arrangements on display at the Phoenix Art Museum. “Vera is full of good ideas, and is still going strong. She has a great sense of humor, too. She always says her fingers won’t work with anything but real flowers.”

Arnold relocated back to her Tempe home two years ago to focus on creating her DVD and build an online business.

Through a fellow Ikebana enthusiast, Arnold found a production company to produce the DVD, renting a church hall in Tempe for the filming. “I’m not an actress, so I was kind of nervous,” she says, “but I’ve had this in my head for years. It is just second nature to me.”

Arnold, who narrated the video without a script, spent half a day taping the 70-minute DVD, which demonstrates how to cut and arrange flowers and greenery in a number of different arrangements as well as advice on choosing containers and using seasonal materials. There’s also a resource section for purchasing tools, vases and fresh flowers. The DVD retails for $20.

The result was “more than I could have imagined,” she says, and customers seem to think so, too. So far, the artist has received inquiries and orders from as far away as India and Singapore via her Web site (www.theikebanastudio.com).

Part of Ikebana’s appeal stems from its cost effectiveness. Flowers can come from a home garden, grocery store or even Mother Nature, according to Arnold, who is not averse to foraging by the roadside for wildflowers and grasses for her arrangements.

“I’m thinking of having a bumper sticker made up: ‘Careful! I brake for weeds,’” she chuckles.