Flowers - Hardcover

Roehm, Carolyne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0770436765 ISBN 13: 9780770436766

Publisher: Potter Style, 2012

Synopsis

It has been more than a decade since Carolyne Roehm first shared her love of gardening and flower arranging. Now, for the first time ever, she turns her own photographic lens to that passion with Flowers, showcasing more than 300 images of the varieties in her abundant gardens, all captured at their most vibrant and exquisite moments throughout the season.

With a gardener’s intimate understanding and a designer’s elegant eye, Roehm shows us the flowers she has cultivated for decades in and around Weatherstone, her historic Connecticut home. While alternating dramatic close-ups with portraits of lovely arrangements and sweeping views of her land, Roehm writes with wit, emotion, and affection of what flowers have meant to her, as well as of the joys and travails of the committed gardener’s life.

What began as a casual hobby ultimately became a multi-year endeavor, as Roehm used her camera to explore the special relationship a gardener enjoys with her carefully nurtured beauties. The outcome is a remarkably personal visual essay: sumptuous, surprising, and as revealing of the sensibility behind the camera as the magnificent species that stand before it.

This beautiful objet d’art—a flower garden in a book—is Carolyne Roehm’s most significant and singular volume yet.

About this title

About the Author

CAROLYNE ROEHM is one of America’s most important tastemakers. She is the author of eleven books, including A Passion for Interiors, A Passion for Blue & White, A Passion for Flowers, A Passion for Parties, At Home with Carolyne Roehm, and Presentations. A columnist for Veranda, she is a frequent lecturer at garden clubs, botanical gardens, junior leagues, and women’s organizations. She divides her time between her exquisite homes in Manhattan and Connecticut.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

There are two types of peonies: the herbaceous variety, consisting of individual flowers, and the deciduous shrub. Or, as I like to refer to them, the blondes and the brunettes. 
   The blonde herbaceous ones are, like their two-legged sisters, easy to love—they’re big, blowsy, and abundant, and you just want to pull them to you, bury your nose in their crazy, flyaway petals, and inhale that sweet perfume. If this sounds like damning with faint praise, I swear on every brown hair on my head that it isn’t. Blonde peonies put me in mind of Marilyn Monroe (all right, she wasn’t a real blonde, but she had the soul of one): the flowers exude a fantastic life force—they simply explode before your eyes, and everything they are remains on display at all times. Whether you see a great swath of them in the garden or come upon their adorable heads bobbling in a vase, you understand the Marilyn peonies the moment you look at them, and your heart foods with gratitude and pleasure. 
   Even so, I’d give a slight edge to the brunette—if the herbaceous variety belongs to Marilyn, the deciduous is Greta Garbo. The beauty of the “tree” peony, as it’s called, is less obvious, more unconventional. You have to unpack layers of mystery to fully appreciate its character; it is fascinating rather than effusive. As with poppies, the petals of a peony can be as delicate and translucent as crepe; the flower’s deep scarlets and magentas manage to be at once boldly saturated and subtly nuanced.    
   Though it can break your heart to cut them, a single bloom in a vase will reward long contemplation. I adore my roses the most. But no flower more clearly expresses for me the presence of the spiritual in the realm of nature than this one.

Edition details

• Publisher: Potter Style
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0770436765
• ISBN 13: 9780770436766
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288