Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, Helen Olsen takes on a new identity. No cosplay is involved, though: no velvet turbans, no fluffy fur stoles, no cigarette smouldering in a black-gloved hand, no raw oysters washed down with flutes of champagne, and, most certainly, no amphetamines. Still, her channelling of Baroness von Blixen-Finecke, the literary enchanter known as Isak Dinesen, is uncanny.
Armed with secateurs in the almond-green kitchen of Rungstedlund, the aristocrat’s house some 30km north of Copenhagen, Olsen spends two immersive days arranging blossoms that have been plucked from the surrounding acreage, gardens as well as woodland. She puts herself into a Karen Blixen frame of mind, placing each stem as she believes the writer – a spectral figure with a Ramses II profile who died in 1962, aged 77 – might have done. Flamboyant and unruly, frequently asymmetrical and often seemingly unbalanced, Olsen’s arrangements are as audaciously composed as those created by the sage of Rungstedlund: bosomy roses meet homely perennials, sturdy wildflowers and rugged weeds.
‘She took the whole garden with her into the house,’ says Olsen, Rungstedlund’s floral director since 1996. A former jazz-ballet instructor and a mother of three, she had worked for several years at the café on the 40-acre Rungstedlund property, which, as in Blixen’s day, is a sustainable landscape and bird sanctuary. A creative position eventually came open. ‘I held up my hand,’ she recalls, ‘and said, “I’ll do it.”’ This despite not knowing a great deal about flowers (‘They were a hobby of mine’) and nothing about the baroness’s eloquent, eccentric way with them, so different from the historically well-mannered national norm. ‘In the beginning, I was a little confused, so I realised I had to figure out how to do this,’ Olsen remembers. ‘I started making drawings of Karen Blixen’s arrangements and tried to copy them. Then it began to make sense. She didn’t like compact arrangements – she liked them wild and open, like explosions.’ Ring a Danish florist today and request something i Blixen-stilen, and they know precisely what is expected.
‘When she opened the front door, there was a wonderful cachepot filled with a large and lovely mixed arrangement, mostly white, but some blues and lilac colours, and very soft pinks,’ recalls Deeda Blair, who visited Rungstedlund the summer before her marriage to the American ambassador to Denmark in 1961. ‘It was as if she knew I did not care for red, yellow or orange. She said they were to celebrate our wedding. Her flowers had a quality of simplicity that I loved, and you definitely felt she had arranged them herself.’
At Blixen’s coffee plantation in Kenya in the 1920s, heart-catchingly evoked in her memoir Out of Africa, tall cylindrical metal vases, set on polished parquet rather than on tabletops, hosted eruptions of flowering branches or towering white lilies, perhaps the same variety that she would describe as ‘big, massive, heavy-scented lilies [that] sprang out on the plains’ just before rainstorms. Returning to Denmark during the Great Depression – after her marriage to a swashbuckling yet syphilitic Swede had collapsed, her romance with an Old Etonian big-game hunter ended in a fatal aeroplane crash and her 6,178-acre investment had soured – she settled at Rungstedlund, her birthplace. Blixen spent the next three decades there, conjuring enigmatic stories – among them Seven Gothic Tales and Babette’s Feast – on the Corona No. 3 typewriter that she had purchased during World War I. Her paragraphs were strewn with flowers: women wearing voluminous skirts that reminded her of peonies ‘gracefully flung upside down’, a profusion of lilacs scenting a boudoir, two unspecified blooms falling from Pierrot’s hands. Even a giraffe herd could be horticulturalised, imagined as ‘a family of rare, long-stemmed, speckled gigantic flowers slowly advancing’.
‘I think that flowers in themselves are one of life’s miracles, and that it is a delight to occupy oneself with them,’ Blixen wrote to a friend, ‘but you probably know that it is my particular passion to arrange them in water. Every time it is as if you were painting a flower picture.’ When she deemed her botanical ensembles to be masterworks, it would be time to call Steen Eiler Rasmussen – an eminent Copenhagen architect who tinkered with Rungstedlund in 1960 – and coax him to take a drive up the coast. ‘I’ve done some arrangements,’ the baroness smokily crooned, ‘if you would care to come and photograph them, Professor.’ He never could resist, it seems. A selection of his images appear in Karen Blixen’s Flowers: Nature and Art at Rungstedlund, an engrossing little 1992 collection of evocative essays, one written by Rasmussen, that is maddeningly out of print.
Olsen and her floral crew, Lisbeth Godtkjær Lauritsen and Lene Brandt, deploy the same arsenal of containers on which her predecessor depended, such as a hefty crystal campanaform urn and a couple of antique porcelain soup tureens touched with gold. One of the latter is tradition ally placed in the drawing room, atop a nailstudded brass chest that was a gift from Farah Aden, the Somali majordomo of Blixen’s Kenya farm. Olsen also uses many of the same seasonal plants – volunteers oversee the gardens – including the honey perfumed linden blossoms that make an appearance in an unmistakably erotic passage in Blixen’s short story Sorrow-Acre.
Visitors to Rungstedlund, which is open all year round, are invariably entranced when they come across Olsen at work in the kitchen. ‘People like to see what I’m doing, which is very charming,’ she says. ‘But if it gets too busy and too crowded, I just shut the door.’ Her efflorescences may be inspired by Blixen’s, but they do not replicate them. For one, Blixen removed all leaves to allow the blossoms to take centre stage. Olsen rejects that editing, noting that deleting every leaf would mean stripping the garden of too many flowers. She does, though, honour Blixen’s sense of profligacy. One recent vase contained a cushion of hydrangeas dramatically speared with gladiolus, buddleia and leek flowers, while another was a whirlwind of cosmos, painted daisies, ornamental millet and Japanese anemones. Her takes on Blixen’s style are captivatingly opulent and practically carnal; the baroness would surely approve.
‘Karen Blixen was an extremely sensual person,’ Elisabeth Nøjgaard, the museum’s director, says. ‘She once wrote a letter to her brother from Kenya, telling him that she had met an American who told her that she was the least sexual person he had ever met but definitely the most sensual. Blixen absolutely agreed.’ In the same letter, Nøjgaard continued, ‘she declared that she was not concerned with erotic relationships, but more interested in a greater feeling, a holistic balance of body and mind’. At Rungstedlund, the flowers do their part to keep that spirit alive. The baroness once advised Rasmussen that a book should be devoted to her floral sorcery, which indeed occurred. The World of Interiors thinks that Helen Olsen’s is ready for its closeup.
Karen Blixen Museum, Rungsted Strandvej 111, 2960 Rungsted Kyst, Denmark. blixen.dk
A version of this story appeared in the January 2023 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
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