Florilegium
This book is a florilegium, an anthology of floral portraits. The photographs explore my view of flowers and invite the reader to share in this visual experience of color, form, and light. The flowers were mostly gathered from small family-owned farms located in rural Virginia within a two-hour drive from our home. And a few came from my own flower garden that runs along the sidewalk to our front door.
For many years, I denied myself the joy of flowers. The voice in my head warned that flowers were an expensive luxury. That they would die quickly and not be a sensible investment. I settled for occasional grocery store bouquets and insisted they were just fine. But a life lived in this way, as though we are only worthy of the least of everything, is a life only half lived.
When my husband treated me to a flower subscription from a local flower farm for my 66th birthday, I began to see what I had been missing. I didn’t just rethink my thoughts about flowers, I began to reconsider my thoughts about aging, and how I want to spend my remaining years. Photographing the flowers became a practice of mindfulness—a way to accept the fragility of life with gentleness and vulnerability.
May turning the pages of this book encourage you to take a gentler path through the garden, embracing each day for all its worth. That you will expand beauty to include all the phases of life from seed to bloom and beyond. That you might save some seeds for future generations and know that you are held in a life larger than your own.
"In times of uncertainty, and in a world that sometimes seems to be spinning out of control, flowers bring solace, order and symmetry—as anyone who has raked their hand through a patch of soil or watched the first green shoots appear from a cultivated seed well knows. The relationship is ancient and intimate. Our minds need the wild." —Lucy Davies, New Photography of the Flower. 2025
Please view the completed book here.
