After I had some issues following the and perhaps driven by visits of my mother-in-law (and again), this year she decided to pay me a visit on valentines day, which means I have a whole week (7 days) to prepare! Unfortunately I went overboard again and promised more things to impress her – I mean, impose my creativity and talent upon her – which led me to state the following:
"You really think that was all I can do? I will show you true beauty. I shall create the most magnificent field of flowers you have ever witnessed, for I can do anything!"
The moment I saw the thin smile on her lips I realized the trap I ran into, but it was already too late, the words were spoken. "I will look forward to it then. I sure hope you don't disappoint me…" – with those words, she left and I went to work.
For this task the following rules and limits apply:
- Only officially published materials
- Up to 20 levels at your disposal
- Multiclassing allowed
- Feats and Magic Items are available as needed
- Unlimited money
- Time Limit: 7 days (or 168 hours / 241.920 minutes if you like that better)
- No use of wish in any capacity
- The flowers must at the very least look fresh / alive when my mother-in-law arrives, though actually fresh ones are of course superior
- If you bring creatures that count as plants, that is a bonus and also a valid addition
- Illusory flowers do not count, since unfortunately my mother-in-law is blessed with Truesight out to ridiculous ranges.
The best answer would be one to create as many distinctive physical flowers as possible, meaning the count matters first and foremost.
Best Answer
67,200
There are 10 rounds in a minute. There are 100 rounds in ten minutes. There are 600 rounds in an hour. There are 14,400 rounds in a day, or 9,600 rounds in a 16 hour day allowing for one 8 hour long rest.
To guarantee that you have a staff of flowers charge available for every round, you need 9,600 charges, which is 960 staves. Each staff is worth 100 gold, so you need 96,000 gold for day one, then another 96,000 gold for day two.
On day two the staves from the first day recharge, while you use the second set of staves, and on day three they recharge again, whereupon you switch and let set 2 recharge for the whole day, in a loop (mimimum 5 charges per recharge, max charges on one set at the start of every other day.) From there you have to spend an extra 100 gold whenever you break a staff by draining it.
You can also add a generous gold cost of approximately 100 gp for unskilled labor, to pay someone strong enough to carry your gold back and forth for these readily available items for the duration of the week, and another 4000 gold to pay a party of four mercenaries(adventurers) to protect the gopher in case someone decides to take advantage of 'easy coin.'
We're at 196,100 gp + 100x, where x = the number of staff breaks during the week.
We are producing 9600 flowers of choice per day for 7 days, resulting in 67,200 flowers of personal choice.
For funsies
We do this with a Mark of Warding Dwarf with the Selesnya background, pure 20 cleric. Any subclass will work. Assuming that she arrives on the 8th day, for part of your long rest you spend it casting a Spell Glyph of Warding; Speak with Plants. The trigger for glyph of warding is when your mother comes within range in the field of flowers, she becomes the target of speak with plants.
She can now understand the flowers, which can now understand her. Glyph of warding is the only way this can happen, unless she is secretly a level 5 or higher adventurer(the spell is normally self-target, but spell glyph bypasses this).
But we can do better. After all, we have a guaranteed Divine Intervention. We're going to activate it to make this field of speaking flowers permanent so that they may sing nature deity's praise forever to any who will listen.
The following day when she departs, we will Hallow the site, granting it a permanent Tongues effect, and charge admission to recoup our losses so we can make another holy site elsewhere to sing nature's praises. This is not a profit endeavor- we will recover exactly as much gold we need to to repeat this process in a second location, which may be as little as a fifteen thousand gold depending on how many of the staves initially broke.
Or we could outsource the labor involved and leave her in charge of the flowers she's going to fall in love with...