About Floralist
Though I’ve hesitated to take on the title, I’ve always been a writer, more comfortable expressing myself and exploring ideas through words on a page. I’m also an avid non-fiction reader and life-long learner who regrets every college class I slept through (except maybe accounting), and every book I only “read” on Spark Notes. I love learning about other people and their experiences, and it was only a matter of time before my love of writing and learning and flowers merged into something. This has been a year of things finally coming to fruition, and Floralist is one of those things.
Floralist is a new online publication about flower people: artists, growers, designers, scientists, who have dedicated their life and their craft to flowers. Featuring interviews, profiles, and films, Floralist will be a space for flower people and flower enthusiasts to learn about and celebrate flowers.
Read an excerpt from the (new!) website below and stay-tuned for the first interviews coming this spring!
I first began dreaming about Floralist after a visit to Strand Books. If you’ve never been to Strand in lower Manhattan, it’s an overwhelming experience that feels as intrinsically New York City as a bagel with lox or a subway car without air conditioning.
The store houses a supposed 18 miles of books, spanning three levels, four if you count their rare book room and event space. Its creaky wooden floors make quiet, introverted roaming an impossible feat. It is often frustratingly busy, uncomfortably warm, and yet is the most marvelous place to lose track of time.
Usually I make a beeline for the cookbook and food writing section, but I had recently discovered a very small collection of floral books–maybe two or three shelves, one of them too high to reach without a ladder–at the back of the 2nd floor.
The books ranged in topic, from floral design for the DIY bride, to dried flower crafts and vintage home entertaining guides. That day I saw a book I hadn’t heard of, Strange Bright Blooms: A History of Cut Flowers, written by Randy Malamud, an English professor at Georgia State University. I took a picture of the book, intrigued, and went home. But I couldn’t get it out of my head, and a few months later I returned, bought it, and proceeded to read through it, from cover to cover, in just a few sittings.
Strange Bright Blooms is an exploration of art, literature, and political, social, and cultural moments through flowers. Malamud opens the book on flowers in literature, citing Emily Dickinson who is a known anthophile, both using floral references in her poetry and, famously, growing, collecting, and pressing flowers in a meticulously-kept herbarium. Malamud continues throughout the book to explore flowers in paintings and sculpture, flowers as part of significant cultural movements, flowers and their relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, and war. Despite having worked with flowers for several years at that point, it really hadn’t dawned on me how deeply, and often invisibly connected we are to flowers. They are woven into the fabric of our cultures and societies so delicately we almost don’t notice them. Yet they are there in textiles and stories, in our food and drink, in our homes, our skincare routines, and, most notably, in our celebrations and traditions.
Without even trying, we are encountering flowers every day.
Continue reading over on Floralist, and if you’re interested in staying up to date on new interviews and posts, sign up for the Floralist newsletter and follow on Instagram! I hope you’ll follow along and help to grow a new community of flower people.