The Book of Flowers
Garden21: Sunflowers- “with showers of golden dust” Julie Meridian
Ohio Roots Collection.

12x16 (1 matted and in stock)
Custom Sizes Available
The layered effect is created with reflections in plexiglass and captued in camera.

The Book Of Flowers: An Artists Garden

The Book of Flowers: An Artist’s Garden is inspired by a vintage guide to wild flowers, Nature’s Garden: An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and Their Insect Visitors, first published in 1900.  At that time, the theories of Charles Darwin and other botanists were still relatively new, and naturalists were in a state of bliss and wonder to discover that the beauty of flowers evolved not purely for our own enjoyment, but rather as an adaptation to attract particular insect pollinators.

And yet, and yet…. in spite of science, there was still an intuitive sense that “the flower has not given us its message yet.” There was still a yearning “to know the soul of the flowers.”

In my garden, the book exists only in my imagination. Pages are transformed and layered with reflections, objects, and images from my collection. Flowers appear to take root and grow up and out of a fertile ground of pages. Plants cycle from morning to evening, spring to fall, seed to bloom to death and renewal. Fragments of the book’s text, like seeds, become captions and grow into a poetic narrative. Here, each flower speaks in its own
luminous voice, of myth and memory, wonder and mystery, transience and grief, and the enduring solace of beauty.