The Floral Dispatch #3: Flowers, flowers, everywhere! 🌼🌼🌼

Greetings from Flowerlandia! 🌸

Oct 02, 2022

Hello!

I’ve been excited to write this newsletter to you, sweet flower lovers! Over the past few months, I have found a new community and renewed sense of love for flowers and nature thanks to Hoovu Finds. It’s an astonishing amount of floral beauty that has been coming my way (and I suppose I’m seeking it out more actively too). And I’m ever so grateful.

The last weekend was spent with many of you from Bangalore, and it was two days of soaking up this warm feeling of familiarity and gentleness that is akin to love. So thank you all for the loveliness :)

We also launched The Floral Monologues by Rucha Dhayarkar, a photo zine that explores her relationship with flowers. ⁠It’s been so wonderful watching this idea grow from a seed to an actual physical zine that is travelling across borders now, passing hands from one flower lover to another. 🌸🌻😍 YAY!

Order the zine

The Hoovutober Art Challenge is upon us!

Join us in drawing daily flowers this #Hoovutober from October 1st to 31st, 2022. Inspired by Jake Parker’s annual #Inktober Challenge, we decided to create our own list of prompts (above) to inspire the flower lovers community to get into the habit of drawing regularly and to inspire each other throughout the month.

We’ll be reposting Instagram stories on @hoovufinds through the month with your floral drawings, so do use the #Hoovutober hashtag while sharing your work!

Floral Poems

1. The Flowers of Love by Tarannum Riyaz

If you should leave me now and go away
the world will not come to an end
the gift of life is given to us but once
I will not pine and sigh
go, be unfaithful if you will

I shall seek consolation with someone else
in the spring-scented garden of life
I too shall pick the flowers of love.

2. Sending Flowers by Hannah Stephenson

The florist reads faces, reaches into the mouths of customers.
Turns curled tongues into rose petals,

teeth clinking against one another into baby’s breath.
She selects a cut bloom, a bit of leaf,

lays stem alongside of stem, as if building a wrist
from the inside. She binds them

when the message is right, and sighs at the pleasure
of her profession. Her trade:

to wrangle intensity, to gather blooms and say, here,
these do not grow together

but in this new arrangement is language. The florist
hands you a bouquet

yanked from your head, the things you could not say
with your ordinary voice.

3. What I Would Like to Grow in My Garden by Katherine Riegel

Peonies, heavy and pink as ’80s bridesmaid dresses
and scented just the same. Sweet pea,
because I like clashing smells and the car
I drove in college was named that: a pea-green
Datsun with a tendency to backfire.

Sugar snap peas, which I might as well
call memory bites for how they taste like
being fourteen and still mourning the horse farm
I had been uprooted from at ten.
Also: sage, mint, and thyme—the clocks
of summer—and watermelon and blue lobelia.

Lavender for the bees and because I hate
all fake lavender smells. Tomatoes to cut
and place on toasted bread for BLTs, with or without
the b and the l. I’d like, too, to plant
the sweet alyssum that smells like honey and peace,
and for it to bloom even when it’s hot,

and also lilies, so I have something left
to look at when the rabbits come.
They always come. They are
always hungry. And I think I am done
protecting one sweet thing from another.

Floral Art for the Soul

Kashmir Pop Art’s Digital Floral Collages

We are big fans of Kashmir Pop Art, a visual artist working across mixed mediums, mainly photography to create digital collages. She is particularly intrigued by floral patterns and flowers in general, and often replaces her subjects' faces with flowers as they are symbolic of life and change.⁠

Follow her work on Instagram.

Ogawa Kazumasa’s Hand-Coloured Photographs of Flowers (1896)

A stunning floral series by Ogawa Kazumasa, a Japanese photographer, printer, and publisher known for his pioneering work in photomechanical printing and photography in the Meiji era.

See the full series on Public Domain Review.

Floral Cyanotypes by Rosalind Hobley

In London-based artist Rosalind Hobley’s expressive cyanotypes, flowers assume a portrait-like quality through varied textures and supple shapes. Her Still Life series features a cast of dahlias, anemones, roses, and peonies that sit like regal subjects.

See the full series on Colossal.

Floral Pencil Shavings by Haruka Misawa

Japan-based designer Haruka Misawa was charmed by little pieces of shavings that were formed after sharpening her pencils. That’s when she started to create colorful paper layers in pencil-like shapes that result into tiny, delicate flowers after using a sharpener on them.

The Reading Nook

Zoe Todd’s Tenderness Manifesto (Excerpt)

“How do I gather up those rose petals of tenderness? How do we acknowledge it exists in these many reflections and refractions? How do we tend to one another, hush and sing and care for each other, when some of us have felt too much tenderness. Too much connection. How do we tend to this ‘too much’, this ‘too much’ which manifests in ways that do not urge us out of the earth at the sun’s first blush to meet its return, but in fact triggers us to bury deeper into the soil, to find safety in its embrace? How do we hold space for these many experiences of tenderness?”
-Zoe Todd

Some other fascinating reads:

How bombweed invaded my brain
Zadok Ben-David's Blackfield: Behind the scenes (How more than 17,000 metal flowers become a breathtaking piece of art)
How noticing the seasons can deepen your connection with nature
The Sprite and the Gardener by Joe Whitt and Rii Abrego (K. O'Neill, creator of The Tea Dragon Society series, describes the graphic novel as “a delightful flower-scented tale of community and harmony with nature.”

Apps we love

Merlin Bird ID recognises nearly any bird you see or hear
iNaturalist helps you identify the plants and animals around you
Co-Star, a hyper-personalized app bringing astrology into the 21st century

At a personal level, I spent the evening with my sweet five-year-old niece, painting roses and walking around Cubbon Park picking fallen palash flowers. It’s been a dream to take her to Cubbon (my second home) since the day she was born, so it feels unreal that it actually happened.

Our walk reminded me of Mary Oliver’s words:

“Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin-flowers. And the frisky ones–inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones–rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Just felt like sharing :)

And on that note, do pay attention to the flowers you co-exist with. Go out on a walk around your neighbourhood, forage some fallen flowers and observe them up close. Draw flowers with us through #hoovutober. Write a poem about them.

Whatever it may be, keep flowers close. It’ll make you smile more often. Promise.

Lots of love and fleurs,
Rohini