Our love of flowers and desire to be close to them has, across cultures and for millennia, created both landscapes and livelihoods. In this book, Christin Geall covers hot topics such as aesthetics, appropriation, fair trade, floriculture, globalization, indigeneity, modernism, seasonality, and tokenism—to name only a few of the over eighty entries presented in an accessible A to Z format.
In her inimitable style, Geall shares personal stories and ideas from growers and designers, weaving her narratives between art, ecology, and history to get readers truly thinking about their relationships to plants, gardens, and design.
Groundbreaking, unique, and beautiful, the book features over 250 images from over 40 countries, taking readers on a journey across continents in search of a deeper understanding of how we might live with plants on a changing planet.
Cultivated: The Elements of Floral Style elevates floral design to fine art in this richly informative and entertaining work on the principles of floral style. A charming and intelligent mentor, Christin Geall emboldens designers, gardeners, and entrepreneurs to think differently and deeply about their work with flowers as she draws upon the fine arts and historical sources—whether exploring Baroque music, ikebana, the paintings of the Impressionists, or the work of floral innovators like Gertrude Jekyll and Constance Spry. Cultivated offers lessons and personal reflections on colour, creativity and aesthetics useful to anyone pursuing an artistic connection to the natural world.
PRAISE:
"Geall might just be the M.F.K. Fisher of flowers." —Lorene Edwards Forkner, Seattle Times
"...the book will...teach you “how to see flowers,”...It’s a worthy exercise for any design buff, who is likely to emerge from the book with newfound appreciation for the botanical arts. —Allie Weiss, Architectural Digest
"Christin Geall is the rare talent who has the eye of an artist, the pen of a poet, and the heart of a gardener." Erin Benzakein, author of Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden
"I love this book celebrating garden-grown, imperfect, shapely flowers in glorious, dynamic, fecund vases in the Dutch still life painting style. There are elm flowers here, banksia rose twirls, plums on the branch, coppery bracken fronds-a harvest of beautiful things, overlaying an impressive depth of research and authoritative advice on all the practical skills to know to become a good flower arranger."
—Sarah Raven