Coin Flower; Florum Denarios (2013)

A friend of mine had organised a house warming party.
It's normal to bring gifts and she told us she'd really liked to have a "Money tree" in their yard. She mentioned this for fun, she actually wanted money or gift certificates to use for their garden or for tools.

A "Money tree" isn't really original. I decided I liked a money plant way better and I started to design a basic plant using coins.

The Coin Flower, or Florum Denarios in Latin.

I ended up with a 6 leafed flower, that holds exactly 1 Euro in cash. (6x 5c + 1x 20c in the middle and 2x20c+ 1x10c at the back. 20 flowers were put on an iron wire and stuck in some dirt filled PVC pipes.

How to:

• Make a 6 leafed template and use it to cut the amount of flowers you like.
• Paint them in a copper color. I painted the backside black.
• Use hotglue to glue the coins on. Don't glue them to tight together.
• Cut the leafs up to the middle coin to create separate petals.
• Bent the leafs; 3 up and curl the edges
• Glue the 3 bend leafs to the middle coin.
• Add some stamen; 3 golden iron wire pieces with a gold bead glued on top. (You can also do this last, making it easier to connect the flower to the stem)
• Glue the base coins at the other side. 
• Bent a thick iron wire and bent a loop at the end. (The stem; use several lengths)
• Glue the flower to the loop 
• Take 6 pieces of PVC pipe and tape them together.
• Secure these in a flower pot and fill them with dirt.
• Put the flowers in the PVC pipes.

The flower in 4 steps

To finish it all I made a little information sheet and glued it on the pot.

Mine said: "Coin Flower (Florum Denarios). The Coin Flower is a very rare type of plant. It's a slow growing vegetation which grows the best with as less sunlight as possible. When the plant is placed in direct sunlight, there's a big change the plant will loose its leafs"

I played a bit with the fact that if you keep this plant in sight it's most likely someone will steal the flowers.