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ABRAMS BOOKS - Fielding Amy Fielding

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263 pages

English

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A modern look at a stunning assortment of blooms and the art you can create with a simple flower pressA contemporary look at flowers, flower pressing, and floral arranging, The Modern Flower Press is a stunning collection of pressed flower techniques and the art you can make with them. Exploring a range of specific blooms, authors Amy Fielding and Melissa Richardson take readers through the process of pressing flowers, the proper techniques to use, the tools needed, and most importantly, the lovely works you can create. Filled with projects inspired by the changing seasons, this book is both a catalog of gorgeous flowers and a practical guide to working with their beauty. Fielding and Richardson offer detailed information, with a specific focus on composition, color, and form. From decorated window panes to letters and postcards, the end results are simply enchanting. Whether you're a gardener, floral enthusiast, or simply a nature lover, this incredible gift book has something for everyone.

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Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	16 août 2022
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781647008307
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	15 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1322€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932221
ISBN: 978-1-4197-6467-7
eISBN: 978-1-64700-830-7
Text copyright 2022 Melissa Richardson and Amy Fielding
Images copyright individual copyright holders
Design by Zo Bather
First published in Great Britain in 2022 by William Collins, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
Published in the United States in 2022 by Abrams, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address below.
Abrams is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
Preface
Introduction
Nigella
Mulberry
Hellebore
GUIDE: Pressing Tools
Herbarium
Carl Linnaeus
GUIDE: Pressing Flowers
Snowdrop
Pressing Wildflowers
Narcissus
Fritillaries
GUIDE: Mounting Pressed Flowers
Bluebell
GUIDE: Decorative Tiles
Primula
Violet
GUIDE: Projects for a Personal Touch
Foxglove
Fern
GUIDE: Fern Stamp
Rakesprogress
Cosmos
Anemone
Devon
Geranium
Poppy
Lampshades
Weed or Flower
GUIDE: Growing for Pressing
Iris
Cornflower
Marigold
Sketch Facade
Rose
Joseph Banks
Ranunculus
Oshibana
Lily
Decorating Furniture
Carnation
Rosa Banksiae Triptych
Botanical Heroines
GUIDE: Cyanotype Printing
Tulip
Jasmine
Sketch Mayfair Windows
Sweet Pea
GUIDE: Pressed Flower Windows
Daisy
GUIDE: Weddings
Orchid
Taking Care of Nature
Lightbox Commission
Nature Printing
Transience
A Conversation with Nick Knight
Author Biographies
Index of Searchable Terms
Picture Credits
Acknowledgments
Preface
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.
Endymion, John Keats (1795-1821)
Long ago I opened a secondhand book and a pressed flower fluttered out and lay in the sunshine leaking through the blinds that spring morning. It was as delicate as a butterfly s wing; its colours barely faded; the petals papery and translucent. I wondered who had pressed that flower? Were they trying to capture a precious moment long forgotten? Only the flower remained. Whatever it had meant to the presser was lost, but the pansy, released from the pages of the book after so many years, was as beautiful as the day it was picked.
A pressed flower is like a memory; and like memories they change and fade over time. Flowers, with their brief little performance in the sun, have reminded many of the great poets and thinkers of their own mortality. Their fragility is a sharp and barely acknowledged pain. As the flower opens, it has already begun its dance with death. By cutting a flower and pressing it we are extending its life and defying nature. We have in some way helped them to escape their inevitable fate.
Introduction
Melissa Richardson and Amy Fielding are joint directors of renowned London florist JamJar Flowers and its sister company, JamJar Edit.
Amy and I came together by chance when she knocked on the door of the JamJar studio around five years after I started the business. As it happens we are pretty much opposites, as much as I am mercurial and messy and careering towards seventy, Amy is just embarking on married life with her first baby, fantastically organized and meticulous about detail. Our strengths and weaknesses balance us out. Our combined love of the natural world has kept us on track and we have built a business together in JamJar Edit-our online shop and flower-pressing studio. We kind of stumbled into the world of pressed flowers, but we quickly fell in love with the process, and now we want to share some of our adventures with you here.
So we invite you to come with us on a journey of discovery and preservation. As well as being something of a manual for those who want to try their hand at flower pressing, we have tried to cover all aspects of the craft that are interesting to us. We have considered the people who pressed flowers for practical reasons-to record a plant or document a journey of discovery; those who press for sentimental reasons, to try to preserve a precious moment; or those who do so as part of an artistic practice. We have explored all the ways in which we could lift this craft out of its traditional confines and make it more relevant and modern, taking the most simple craft and elevating it to a higher level. This is where we believe it deserves to be; not tucked away in dusty Victorian herbaria, but adorning the walls of modern British homes and recalling us to nature with stunning visual artworks.
The idea for this book took shape during the Covid-19 lockdown, when so much of our lives, including our business, seemed to be disappearing before our eyes. In March 2019, as we strived to make sense out of the crazy situation, we started to sketch out a proposal for a book. We felt we had a story that people might like to hear and we had all the time in the world to think about how we could tell it. So although this book was born out of panic and fear, it also grew from a longing to rediscover the beauty in the world around us. As lockdown continued, we found that nature was pretty much what we were left with and that wasn t too awful a proposition after all. Research for this book has led us down some fantastic rabbit holes, from which we emerged blinking into the sunlight and yearning to know more.
We hope you will enjoy all the ideas and projects in these pages and that it may encourage some of you to try pressing flowers for yourselves. It is a most rewarding pastime and one that we are so pleased to have pursued and brought into the modern world of flower artistry.
Story
NIGELLA
Light love-in-a-mist, by the midsummer moon misguided, Scarce seen in the twilight garden if gloom insist, Seems vainly to seek for a star whose gleam has derided Light love-in-a-mist. Love in a Mist, Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909)

There is nothing more pleasing for growing and pressing than Nigella damascena . All you need is a patch of sparse gravel and a plump seedhead begged from a friend, then you can simply scatter the angular black seeds about. They will come up in May, blue as the summer sky, the beautiful flowers nestled among the feathery leaves, ethereal and pretty-flower faeries dancing in the breeze.
When it comes to pressing, nigella is a JamJar favourite, almost invariably successful and a very good flower to start your experiments with. Nigella is part of the Ranunculaceae family, which makes it first cousin to the buttercup. It is native to southern Europe, North Africa, and Southwest Asia and likes damp, neglected land, which is probably why it loves our London gravel garden so much. En masse, the feathery leaves look like a green mist, with the starry flowers dotted through like hundreds of fluttering, tiny blue butterflies. This delicate foliage fanning out around each flower is how it gets its charming familiar name, love-in-a-mist.
There are many different varieties, and although most are blue, you can also get nigella in pink and white. Persian Jewels is a good cultivar to grow because it has all three colours in one seed pack. First cousin to Nigella damascena is Nigella sativa , also known as black cumin or kalonji/kalanji. (The word nigella stems from the Latin niger, meaning black.) The black seeds are used in cookery in Pakistan, India, and across the Middle East. The fragrant seeds have notes of onion, black pepper, and oregano, and in Palestine they are used to make qizha paste, which has a sharp, bitter taste with an underlying sweetness. It is an ingredient in tahini and various breads and pastries.
There is evidence that Nigella sativa seeds have been highly prized for thousands of years. They were found in Egyptian tombs and discovered in a Hittite flask in Turkey that is more than 4,000 years old. Rather surprisingly, despite their history, there are no myths or legends that I can find surrounding the flower. Its medical uses also seem to be minimal-although we know that nigella seeds were used in ancient times as a medicine for shortness of breath and low blood pressure.
After the flower is over, a wonderfully sculptural seedhead swells. It is bulbous, sometimes striped with red or purple, with a perky, spiky crown. I think this is where the plant gets its less-popular familiar name of devil-in-a-bush, or chase-the-devil.
At JamJar we love using the seedheads as well as the flowers in arrangements, and after they have been dried (simply by being hung upside down in a warm dry place) we use the pods in everlasting dried-flower pieces, where they add form and texture. They are as easy to dry as they are to grow, but always remember to leave a few in the garden to self-seed, so you can be certain of next year s crop.
Nigella has so much to commend it; it is simple to grow, to dry, and to press, and all these attributes make it a beautiful and necessary flower in the JamJar pantheon.
Project
MULBERRY
In August 2014-just a few weeks before the Spring/Summer collections were due to be shown at London Fashion Week-we received a call from the prestigious British fashion label, Mulberry, to discuss an idea for their show invitations. We knew this would be an interesting commission-the previous year Mulberry had collaborated with iconic English brand Wedgwood, who made bespoke teacup and saucer sets to send out to guests ahead of the show, each complementing the colours of the Spring collection.
We were invited to Mulberry to discuss the project and preview their printed fabrics