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Photograph by Zachary Beecher

Magical: Kathy Toy is a master instructor of 'ikebana,' the Japanese art of flower arranging, at Hakone Gardens in Saratoga. Toy was a featured artist in the Palo Alto Clay and Glass Festival this past weekend.

Kathy Toy is a master in the Japanese art of 'ikebana'

By Jennifer McBride

It was the one form of art that joined all of her passions together in harmony.

Willow Glen resident Kathy Toy is a second-term master of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging. Where some people take a lifetime to master this ancient art form, Toy has risen to this prestigious level in less than 20 years. Nowadays, she shares her passion and skills with others by teaching classes at Hakone Gardens in Saratoga and participating in shows such as the annual Palo Alto Clay and Glass Festival, which took place last weekend.

Toy is an interior designer by trade, but has always loved flowers, she says. When she and her husband lived in Tokyo in 1988, Toy decided to take a class in ikebana just to see what it was like.

What she found changed her life.

"Immediately after that first lesson, I started taking lessons every day," she says. "I was drawn to it and felt I needed to learn all I could about it."

Toy studied at the Ohara School of Ikebana in Tokyo. Of the three largest schools of ikebana, Toy says Ohara is considered the most "naturalistic," preferring to use flowers in the most natural of ways.

Toy says ikebana comes from the Japanese root words ikeru, which means "to make live," and hana, which means "flower." Therefore, ikebana literally means, "to make flowers live." Whereas many Western forms of flower arranging emphasize only the quantity and color of the blossoms, ikebana focuses on the linear arrangement of the flowers, and includes the container, stem, leaves and branches. Ikebana strives to create a harmony of the linear construction, rhythm and color. Many written histories indicate the art form began in Buddhist temples in Japan as far back as the sixth century.

"One shortens a flower's life by cutting the stem, so ikebana honors it by giving it more esteem in its death than it had in life. We do that by placing it beautifully for all to see. So the flower becomes a star in its own right," Toy explains, saying everything in nature is not perfect, so by raising the beauty of how everything is presented, ikebana can perhaps raise the human condition.

Since that first day in Tokyo, Toy has gone on to become a second-term master of the art of ikebana, which takes somewhere between 300 and 400 supervised instructor lessons and many tests.

Toy has become very involved with Hakone Gardens in Saratoga, where she has been teaching classes in both beginning and advanced ikebana for six years, as well as volunteering with event planning and graphic arts, and writing the newsletter.

This past weekend, Toy was a featured artist in the Palo Alto Clay and Glass Festival for the first time. Toy said she became enamored of the event after attending last year.

"I was so impressed at the quality of the art and the seriousness of the artists there, and that it was a juried show," Toy says. "Plus, it's such a beautiful, fabulous facility. It's obvious that the space was created especially for artists."

In the festival, Toy performed ikebana demonstrations to show the public how to arrange flowers in a container. She says the purpose of ikebana is largely to showcase the container, but that she also wanted to show her audience at the festival how to arrange flowers within the containers easily enough so that they walked away with the confidence to select flowers from their own gardens and elsewhere and begin making their own creations.

"In ikebana, the container is at least as important as the flowers," she says.

In her demonstrations, all of the containers Toy used were created by clay and glass artists participating in the festival, including Linda Mau of Saratoga, the artist who invited her to be a part of the event.

Although she is a second-term master and successful instructor, Toy says she won't stop there--she continues to further her studies, and returns to Tokyo every couple of years.