BOOKS

Flora Culture – Christin Geall

It should be compulsory reading for every floristry student.

I’d been eagerly waiting to read this since watching Christin’s travels whilst researching this book.

Flora Culture is laid out as a series of mini-essays arranged in alphabetical order. This means you can dip in and out, or read through cover-to-cover if you so wish!

Don’t mistake this for a gentle coffee-table book; Christin sets the tone right from the first essay — Aesthetics —where we are challenged to question why we value certain varieties over others; and to look at the wider impact of our floral choices.

Some topic titles include Anthropocene, Footprint, Globalisation, Memorial, Speciation and onwards to Zeitgeist; this is a book that will educate, illuminate and challenge your preconceptions. It looks beyond the surface beauty of the flowers we love and delves into the history, operation and impact of the floriculture industry from a global rather than a Eurocentric perspective.

Flora Culture has helped to deepen my understanding and challenged me to think more critically about everything we’re doing. An important text!

— Cel Robertson, Grower, Teacher & Writer, UK.

Pretty Dirty – Melanie Stapleton

Pretty Dirty is a gorgeous collection of floral inspiration grounded in Mel’s ethos of Creativity. Community. Compost, and is a celebration of the intersection between nature, beauty and art.

Melanie Cecilia Stapleton, of Cecilia Fox, is widely regarded as one of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand’s top florists — and we’re proud to have Melanie as an SFN Industry Advisor.  She is also a tireless advocate for making the flower industry more holistic.

Pretty Dirty is a glorious ode to the life cycle of flowers from how they’re grown to arranging them in beautiful fresh and unique ways, to the inevitable decomposing and disposal.

It is richly illustrated with stunning images of flowers in the wild, floral collaborations, both by Mel and her “flower folk” from around the world, as well as stylised images of compost and floral waste to prove that beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder.

Mel shares her tips and tricks from her lifetime spent with flowers and Pretty Dirty also features stories from some her favourite floral artists, flower growers and those at the forefront of the “pretty dirty” movement!