New Botanical Collection

Nature is my closest, most giving collaborator and plants are her best accessories. In springtime she gets especially dressed up.

The Story Behind the Botanicals Collection

Nature is my closest, most giving collaborator and plants are her best accessories. In springtime she gets especially dressed up. We’re only a few days into this new season and the Tennessee flora has already managed to blow my mind.

I went to bed last night with a yard full of mud, dead leaves, and jagged patches of Bermuda grass; this morning I woke up to a green so intense I could almost smell it over the coffee. There are buttercups, wild violets, and those little blue flowers whose name I can never remember roaming all over the place and mixing with the clover. Flashes of ivory have started to pop through the waxy leaves of our dogwood, and I imagine that by the end of the day, the branches will be filled with enough snowy white petals to make up for the balmy southern winter we’ve had.

Nature Is My Collaborator

Capturing the incredible moment when one season gives into another is such a special thing. As an artist, it feels almost like cheating; each plant gives up its blueprint as it grows from shoot to bloom and wilts back down into the earth again. The color combinations, forms, and movements are as instructional as they are inspiring.

It’s hard to think that a person could somehow encapsulate the strange alchemy of the plant world, but it was impossible for me not to try. There is something about green growing from the dirt that stays magical forever. The same euphoric look that crossed Shep’s face when I watched him peek through the sandy, slow-blowing seagrass on our last visit to the ocean is the same look I see on his grandma when she’s potting her succulents. I wanted this series to convey that unfading joy.

The Botanicals are influenced by some of my very favorite plants: spruce, buttercup, rose and, of course, seagrass–the ones I still need to stop and stare at every time I pass them. There is no way to replicate the perfect feeling of grass on baby toes or the smell of dropping rose petals, but I hope that this series can bring you and your little ones back to those tiny moments of wonder that nature hands to us.