Say it with Flowers

“Beauty is, no doubt, the most spontaneous and most widespread relationship we have with flowers. We find them so beautiful, so pleasing to the eye that they have entered our daily lives in many different ways. We give them as signs of thoughtfulness, gratitude, or love. We welcome them into our homes, onto our tables, wallpaper, and drapes. We choose them to adorn our bodies, clothes, and skin, and wear them in the form of jewelry. We want them near us, in our flowerpots and gardens, on our screensavers and wall decorations. We make the effort to travel to see them painted by artists. Flowering plants, or angiosperms, are the plant family that most inhabits our imaginations and dreams. To all appearances, we love flowers.”

—Estelle Zhong Mengual, Botanical

Kinfolk Inspired

A photograph works because your eye knows where to land first. Then it discovers everything else. The image unfolds. It doesn’t introduce itself all at once.

—Colin King, The Last Layer

More constraints for my current project. Distinct characteristics of the photographs for my florelegium project.

  • Subject Matter: flowers from local flower farms

  • Natural Lighting: directional daylight

  • Soft color palettes: soft whites, earthy neutral tones, desaturated colors/pastels

  • Minimalist composition: negative space, clean lines, uncluttered backgrounds to draw focus to the flowers themselves as subjects

  • Film-like processing: grain and texture

  • Art Direction: handcrafted, vintage, secondhand vases and supporting elements with genuine personality; relaxed, authentic, unforced

  • When I am creating, I always have this Bauhaus sentence in my mind: Make it simple but significant.

My One Sentence

This book is about .

More from Wesley Verhoeve, 248 ¤ The Hardest Part of Making a Book:

After thinking through your area of interest and your desired limitations, we bring it together into a one sentence description of what your project is about.

This book is about .

The best book concepts sound almost embarrassingly simple when you say them out loud. That simplicity isn’t a weakness. It means you know what you’re making and it’s easy to explain it to others.

My start is obvious and very simple. This book is about flowers.

But then, I need to add context and constraints. The book will not be a series of floral bouquets; it will not be about flower arranging. It will not be an educational or illustrative book. It will not focus on the methods of growing or harvesting flowers. It will not categorize flowers by season or zone. It will not label flowers by name, neither common nor scientific.

My one sentence will sound something like this:

A florilegium (anthology) of flowers, gathered from small flower farms in rural Virginia, celebrating the way flowers bring us to our senses.

My one sentence will be revised as I go along, but this is a good start.