"Life with Flowers: Inspiration and Lessons from the Garden" by Frances Palmer

LIFE WITH FLOWERS: INSPIRATION AND LESSONS FROM THE GARDEN

Frances Palmer has spent nearly four decades creating work that has caught the attention of ceramics lovers, designers, writers, and fellow artists around the world. But there is a whole other vibrant side of her creative life that she’s equally passionate about, devoted to, and expert in—flower gardening and arranging. They are two parallel practices, one indoors in the studio, throwing pots and vases to elevate the flowers, and one outdoors in the garden, raising the most extraordinary flowers to inspire new pots and vases.

Filled with the author’s stunning photography (a third and equally important parallel practice), Life with Flowers is an invitation to both her garden, where we learn all about the planting and arranging of flowers, and her artistic process, showing us how she thinks about flowers, seasons, the land, beauty, form, and everything else that goes into her creative life.

To start, Palmer divides the year into six specific growing periods, from prevernal—those late winter days when the first snowdrops and hellebores appear—through summer and autumnal, with its dahlias and Japanese anemones, to hibernal, as we move back indoors and enjoy forced bulbs and greenhouse flowers. It’s this rich understanding of the gardening year that encourages, in turn, the idea of planning and planting in waves, ensuring that there is always an abundance of bloom and a continual flow of colors, heights, and shapes, providing an endless variety of arrangements.

Generous in sharing her decades of experience and filled with DIY projects, practical tips, favorite recipes that incorporate flowers, and meditations on patience, nature’s unpredictability, flowers in art, and more, this is a book as rich, varied, beautiful, and nourishing as the gardens Frances Palmer has lovingly created.

Where to buy:

United States:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Books-A-Million
Bookshop.org

Canada:
Amazon Canada

United Kingdom:
Waterstones
Amazon UK Foyles

New Zealand:
Mighty Ape