Flower Time-Lapse: Problems and alternative ideas

When researching one of our initial ideas within our trailer, a symbolic time-lapse of a flower, we had some difficulties.
An example of the shot we wanted:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzx-EyEpOnY


The first being finding a flower that buds at the time of our filming which is January, and also a flower that would bud daily so the time-lapse footage wouldn't over a month long, something with tight-scheduling we don't have time for. The second problem we would have is the symbolism of the flower, our initial idea for the shots was that it would ultimately represent our protagonist story, a story of her life and death. We would have preferred the flower we used to have a meaning that in some way reflected the protagonist or again the story line of our trailer. For example a carnation has the meaning of undying love.

The solution we came up with to get something as similar as possible to the shot, and to create the same pathos in our trailer, were two ideas.

The first would be to instead use stills of a flower, that still has symbolic meaning and creates connotations to the audience, the two stills would be at the beginning and at the end of the trailer, the first of the flower either budding or in bloom, and the last a flower dying, or beginning to.
We still thought we could use a time-lapse image in our trailer, as it's a key image within one of the films we were inspired by in the same genre as our trailer, 'The Tree of Life', the film especially uses  time-lapse-like natural imagery to portray the films plot line of the circle of life and the afterlife.


Our group then explored the idea of perhaps filming a time-lapse of the horizon on one of our locations, for example the location of the 50's setting.

Examples of shots we idealised:

The other solution we thought of was to instead film an already bloomed flower and attempt to kill it quickly through placing it in a vase of vinegar.