Our Bloom Tour 2026 Installation: Driftwood, Roses, and the Oregon Coast

Bloom Tour Portland 2026 opened on May 21 and runs through June 8. Forty-plus floral installations are tucked into storefronts across Downtown and Old Town, and ours is at Hi Books on SW Madison.

It's a driftwood floral installation built around four elements: ocean-worn wood, river stones, wild coastal grasses, and bright red roses. This is the story of how we got there. A road trip to Depoe Bay, two days of work, and an unexpected morning right before the doors opened.

The Rose and the Driftwood

Long before we agreed to do an installation for Bloom Tour, the pairing of a rose with a piece of weathered driftwood was already an image we kept coming back to.

It first became iconic in 1932, when Ansel Adams photographed a single pale pink rose, clipped from his mother's garden that morning, resting on a piece of driftwood he had picked up at Baker Beach. The photograph is called Rose and Driftwood. It's a quiet still life, unusual for Adams, who was known for vast landscapes. He searched the house, pulling things off shelves, trying bowls, books, pillows. Nothing worked. Then he remembered the driftwood.

The contrast he found, soft velvet petals against weathered, salt-worn wood, has shaped how florists and photographers see roses ever since.

We wanted to bring that same contrast into something larger and alive. But our version of it had to belong here, in Oregon.

Adams was working in San Francisco. We are on the Pacific coast too, but a different one. The Oregon coast is windier, wilder, colder. The driftwood gets thrown further. The grasses bend harder. The pairing of rose and driftwood feels different on this end of the coast. Less still life, more weather.

And we wanted red roses, not pale pink. Portland is the City of Roses. The rose has been the city's symbol for over a century. So for an installation in downtown Portland, on a tour celebrating bloom, the rose had to carry that. Deep red, not soft. The bold heart of the city resting on the worn, ancient bones of the coast.

A Whole Day on the Oregon Coast

You can buy driftwood. Floral suppliers carry it, dried and sanded, in tidy bundles. We didn't want that. The whole point of the installation was the rawness, the marks the ocean leaves on things. So we drove.

Depoe Bay is about three hours west of Portland, on the central Oregon coast. It calls itself the whale watching capital of the world. We weren't there for whales. We were there for what the tide brings up and leaves behind.

The Oregon coast doesn't tidy itself. After a storm, the beaches look almost violent: piles of driftwood, kelp, bone-white logs, rocks tumbled smooth by years of being thrown around. We walked, picked, weighed pieces in our hands, put them down, picked up better ones. Coastal grasses came too, the stiff, dry kind that holds its shape even after it's cut.

The car was full by the time we turned back. Driftwood across the back seats. Stones in bags. Grasses bundled and tied. Three hours back to Portland with the windows down because everything smelled like salt and seaweed.

Some of the pieces we used. Some we set aside for later. That's the thing about gathering: you take more than you need, because you don't know yet which piece will be the right one.

Building It at Hi Books

Hi Books is a small bookshop at 1211 SW Madison, in downtown Portland. They carry art books, magazines, ephemera, the kind of things you flip through for an hour without meaning to. The space is narrow and clean, with one big front window facing the street. Perfect for an installation.

We pulled up on May 20 with the car still smelling like the coast. Driftwood, stones, grasses, cinder blocks for structure, and roses chosen in two layers. Potted bush roses sourced from nurseries around Portland for the ground level, picked specifically to match the deep red of Nina, the rose we used as cut accents inside the window. The roses had to come from somewhere alive at the end of this, not cut and tossed. So we built around plants that could go on living.

The work took most of the day. Outside the door, two anchor pieces: a large driftwood stump on the left paired with a rose bush, a smaller arrangement on the right with stones, grasses, and a smaller log. Inside the window, the still-life half of the installation: cinder blocks stacked like rough plinths, driftwood laid across them, the cut roses set against the wood. Coastal grasses everywhere, blurring the line between inside and outside.

The owner worked on her own thing inside while we worked on ours outside. Quiet, easy. The light through the window kept shifting. By late afternoon the basic structure was there, and by evening it was almost finished.

We left it standing, locked up, and went home. Bloom Tour opened in the morning.

What We Found the Next Morning

Bloom Tour was opening that day. We came back early to add the last touches and photograph the install before the doors opened.

When we turned the corner onto Madison, we could see from the end of the block that something was off.

People had been through it overnight. Grasses pulled out of their buckets and dragged across the sidewalk. Stones knocked loose and scattered. Some of the driftwood was just gone, walked off into the night. The big anchor pieces and the inside-window installation were untouched, but the sidewalk side, the part we had built up the most carefully, was torn apart.

It was a hard thing to look at. Days of planning, runs to nurseries across Portland to match the roses, a full day on the Oregon coast gathering driftwood and stones, a full day of building. And before the tour had even opened, someone had walked off with parts of it.

So we got to work. Restaked the grasses, repacked the stones, rebalanced the corners. Mary went through our backup driftwood, the pieces we'd set aside in Depoe Bay because we weren't sure about them, and found replacements for what was gone.

By the time Bloom Tour officially opened, the installation was standing again. A few details different, but whole.

How It Stands Now

It's quieter than we expected, the finished version. After everything, we thought the installation would feel hard-won. Instead, it just feels like itself.

Outside, two anchor pieces frame the door: a large driftwood stump on the left with the red rose bush growing up beside it, a smaller arrangement on the right with stones, grasses, and a smaller log. Coastal grasses run along the base of the window, some of them still moving in the wind off Madison Street.

Inside, we designed the front window display as a still life set into the bookshop itself. Stacked cinder blocks as plinths. Driftwood laid across them. The cut Nina roses set against the wood, paired with art books pulled from the shop's own shelves. Hi Books is a working bookshop, and the install was built to draw people in to browse, not just stand outside and look. If you walk past, walk inside too.

The roses won't be cut and thrown out at the end of the tour. The bush roses, the ones in pots, will go on living, planted out somewhere they can keep blooming.

Mary out front of Hi Books, the morning of May 21, just after we walked up and saw what had happened overnight. This is the photo that ended up meaning the most to us. The one taken in the moment we realized we had to do it all again, and decided to.

Come See It (and Vote)

The installation is up at Hi Books, 1211 SW Madison, in downtown Portland, through June 8.

If you're doing the Bloom Tour walking route, we're one of more than forty installations across Downtown and Old Town. The full map is on the Bloom Tour site, and the printed program is at participating shops.

Bloom Tour runs a public vote for favorite installation. If ours moved you, we'd love your vote. There's a QR code on the Vote card in our window, or you can vote directly on the Bloom Tour site. Voting is open through the run of the tour.

And if you come by, walk inside. Hi Books is open and well worth the browse.