I think I saw an exhibit or workshop at
USITT this year on cable and tentacle mechanisms, and I think that might be a solution for this, or may be overkill but a decent starting
point to brainstorm. I foud a couple of excerpts from the Rick Baker School on Youtube on cable mechanisms.
They have a paid course here that has a 7-day free trial that the videos are taken from.
The first one is the full course overview. There are a lot of mechanisms that the course goes through, but at 0:27, there's a short shot of a finger mechanism using flexible tubing and a single cable per finger that might do what you're looking for.
I was able to find a link to a write up on the finger rig here. Again, it's limited, but I think if this is something you want to
chase down, you could get the info you need in the 7-day trial.
The second is more focused on a tail mechanism. The cables run along either side of a material that is rigid in the X direction but flexes in the Y direction.
Working off of the push puppet concept, I wonder if you couldn't cut a section of
PVC pipes into short lengths to act as the beads of the puppet and then run an aircraft cable through some small brackets on each piece to connect to the top of the pipe and run down through the pipe to a control position under a
platform or offstage. If you want to make sure the flowers
droop in a certain direction and the beads don't pivot off to the side, I wonder if you could hinge each section of pipe together with small hinges or something to keep it from twisting as it falls. Then if the weight of the flowers is centered towards the hinged side of the pipe, you could add slack to the cable and they would
droop down. Then you could
cover everything with a tube of stretchy green fabric. If it works, I think this mechanism would also let you gang a bunch of cables together to make a number of flowers all
droop in
unison, as well as reset by pulling the cable taut.
Here's a drawing of what I'm thinking.
PVC pipe in blue, hardware in black, and aircraft cable in red. The right side is a detail drawing to show the joints between the pipe sections. I haven't built anything like this, so I'm not sure if it would work quite how I'm thinking.
View attachment 23183
I also found
this old Reddit thread with links to
a Flickr page where somebody looks to have made a scaled up push puppet using some rigid cardboard and a rope. From the looks of it, I think the prop would need to be manually reset (i.e. you couldn't just pull the rope and make the plant stand back up), but if you don't need to reset in view of the audience, this looks to be a much simpler option.
There's also some magic trick
props like this one that you might be able to
purchase and use or copy.