Foraged Flora. A Year of Gathering and Arranging Wild Plants and Flowers. / Louesa Roebuck and Sarah Lonsdale, 2016. Ten Speed Press. Photography by Laurie Frankel. 265 pages. Illustrations in color.
For this reader, Foraged Flora is as much about personal spaces and locale as about the flora, the flowers themselves. Louesa and Sarah became resident artists at twelve living spaces and businesses in Northern and Southern California, and photographed the flowers there in all four seasons.
Louesa chooses plants from unclaimed seasonal bounty. For Foraged Flora these became indoor arrangements of flowers and fruits still attached to branches or stems with leaves and tendrils, mostly untrimmed or not trimmed in expected ways. The plant portraits display a season’s beauty, such as “wisteria, roses, lilac, apple blossom, redbud, jasmine, and forget-me-nots” for March. Or “hydrangea, roses, fig, magnolia, queen anne’s lace, wild grape, borage and blackberry” for June.
Besides the gorgeous photographs, through a mix of commentary and journal-style pieces Louesa and Sarah, her editor, describe the process and philosophy behind the foraging style. There are also recipes scattered throughout the text.
Not only flowers, but pots and containers occupy the sunny or darkened spaces of interiors, allowing the flowers to peek out from an airy backdrop, a clean white canvas, or stone wall as naturally as if they still sparkled on a tree or shrub, or climbed a wall or bower. The whole effect is strikingly beautiful and begs your read of their experiences which accompany the folio-sized photographs. There you’ll dream of color and delight in each season.
Louesa Roebuck is an artist using flowers and trees to express nature’s abundance. Her aesthetics aren’t far from mine, though familiar as I am with the urban scene. Such a setting for me begs an alliance to wildness, and if sourced directly from nature, is much more exciting. I found the photographs and commentary fascinating. I could imagine myself following her joyful enthusiasm and creating spontaneous-looking arrangements.
I have the strong sense, however, that spontaneity is just a word here, and it doesn’t fully cover the concept. For what is a bunch of pink roses, just the tidy blooms, held captive in a bowl of water? Color and shape only, minus thorns and leaves, tells only half the story and excludes the viewer’s imagination about the whole plant and its neighbors.
One thing to keep in mind when foraging is to have a sense of scale. Scale makes both foraged plants and the space they will decorate look artistic, ensuring an emotional response. An analogy that clarifies this idea is a Japanese painting depicting a woody branch across a silk scroll. In a leisurely pattern the cherry blossom twig strikes its pose before your eyes. One glance and you’re hooked. Perhaps you’d not notice if it were too small, too big, or trimmed to suit formal standards.
Among other considerations, including a glimpse of the life cycle of the flower—at least the part of it now available—exposes its nature. And once inside in our personal spaces a sense of wildness suggestive of real beauty is captured for our eyes. And while absolutely-spent flowers might not be your choice, ones in a progression of bloom would tell secrets, provide movement, and in you the admirer, fire for your imagination, love in your heart, wistfulness for old times…
You get a taste of the space and expansiveness possible when flowers are the objects of beauty in a room. Bringing the outdoors in wherever possible gives you the opportunity to observe beautiful blooms close at hand in the rhythms of your daily life. Louesa’s art engenders your inner conversation with the arrangements, and brings the wildness close enough to touch.
Roses and magnolias, solandra and passionflowers—these are flowers with large and exciting blooms. I don’t think that because you are in Alaska, in Idaho, Florida or Ohio, or your state which is not California, that this view of beauty is too-far-fetched to be meaningful. Rather, an awareness of place layered with expressions symbolic of the locale you live in, is a co-creating act. Foraged flowers, whatever their type, along branches, twigs, stems, leaves and tendrils are wonder-inspiring in themselves and reveal much about the nature of wildness that we look fondly upon. It’s a way of appreciating the abundance of spring, summer, or fall—perhaps sometimes winter, if you are brave enough to look.
See a biographical capture of Louesa Roebuck’s work here.
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