good reads: foraged flora.

white room with pink flowers on the ground via foraged flora. / sfgirlbybay

what happens when one of your favorite floral designers and the co-founder of remodelista team up with one of your photography idols? a beautiful new book: Foraged Flora: A Year of Gathering and Arranging Wild Plants and Flowers by Louesa Roebuck and Sarah Lonsdale and gorgeously photographed by Laurie Frankel. i’m so inspired by this kind of rogue flower arranging that uses local and foraged plants and flowers to create beautiful and somewhat wild looking arrangements — roadside fennel, flowering fruit trees, garden roses, tiny violets; ingredients both common and unusual, humble and showy are growing everywhere around us. this lovely new book inspires us to forage!

floral designs photographed by Laurie Frankel. / sfgirlbybay

i first meet louesa at a charming but tiny flower shop she once ran in san francisco and was instantly drawn to her unique sensibilities. she shared with me how she would literally scour hillsides and even freeway onramps for beautiful blooms. Foraged Flora is a new vision for flowers and arranging. It encourages you to train your eye to the beauty that surrounds you, attune your senses to the seasonality and locality of flowers and plants, and to embrace the beauty in each stage of life, from first bud to withering seedpod. Organized by month, each chapter in this inspiring book focuses on large and small arrangements created from the flowers and plants available during that time period and in that place, all foraged or gleaned nearby. Foraged Flora reflects on surprising and beautiful pairings, the importance of scale, the scarcity or abundance of raw materials, and the environmental factors that contribute to that availability. Whether picking a small tendril of fragrant jasmine, collecting oversized branches of flowering quince, or making a garland of bay laurel, Foraged Flora is a stunning book — an invitation to seek out the beauty of the natural world.

floral arrangement from foraged flora. / sfgirlbybay

tall floral designs photographed for new book foraged flora / sfgirlbybay

floral designs on open white shelves in foraged flora. / sfgirlbybay

floral tablescape in new book, foraged flora / sfgirlbybay

pink and green flowers in new book, foraged flora. / sfgirlbybay

foraged flora, a new book on floral design. / sfgirlbybay

foraged flora, a new book / sfgirlbybay

foraged flora, a new book on floral designing / sfgirlbybay

florist photographed in foraged flora, a new book. / sfgirlbybay

• photography Images (c) 2016 by Laurie Frankel. Reprinted with permission from Foraged Flora by Louesa Roebuck and Sarah Lonsdale, copyright (c) 2016. Published by Ten Speed Press, a division of Penguin Random House, Inc.