This was the core of our annual firework arsenal. We’d often have a brick of these things, leading to a steady course of them over the evening, punctuated by fountain cones or other more exotic (expensive) devices. As the night wore on and we got bored with lighting them one at a time, we tried them in clusters, discovering new and novel principles of thermodynamics. You could braid the fuses of several together. Sometimes this would form a larger, combined Voltron of hissing, skipping, colored flames. Sometimes they wouldn’t stay together, and the spinning fireball would eject a few offspring into new orbits, usually toward watching children. Kept us on our toes. Amazingly we kept all our toes, too.
The pinnacle of Ground Bloom Flower art was amphibious operations. Once the Flower got up to speed, spinning and skipping crazily on the concrete, someone wondered how it would do on water. The families of redneck scientists adjourned to the laboratory: our backyard pool. For a delivery system, a 6″ square piece of plywood was found and floated in the pool. Light the Ground Bloom Flower, nudge the wood out into the pool as the fuse burned down, and…amazement. The Flower whirled to life and danced across the surface of the water. Some of them would fizzle and drown immediately. Some skittered around and burst just as they would on land. But a few…a few of them fought to live. My favorites were the ones that started to slow down, bubbled, then found their second wind and found a way to keep going.
Bonus: the morning of July 5th, the kids on the block were ordered into the pool (hours earlier than normally permitted) to dive and recover the spent Ground Bloom Flowers from the bottom.
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