Life with Flowers

In this follow-up Life in the Studio, potter, gardener, and photographer Frances Palmer celebrates the flowers she most loves to grow and arrange. Frances approaches her garden planning in waves, ensuring there are always beautiful booms for her to photograph in her vases. In Life with Flowers, chapters for each these “waves” includes profiles on her favorite varieties–with flower-specific gardening how-to and arranging techniques hard-won over decades of growing and photographing her flowers–as well as delicious flower-forward recipes and simple DIY projects. Part of the delight and richness of this book comes from the fact that Frances is at once a gardener and an artist: We learn that she was inspired to grow bearded irises after an exhibition of Cedric Morris’s iris paintings at the Garden Museum in London; that when arranging her tulips she thinks of André Kertész 1939 surreal photograph Melancholic Tulip; and that she never passes a tiger lily without imagining the chattering garden from Alice in Wonderland or smells her azalea bush without being transported to the English garden of Rebecca. To read Life with Flowers is to be invited into both the garden and the creative mind of an insatiably curious, highly skilled, and wildly generous talent.