My first season of flowers is over. The signs of decay are everywhere. The bleached leaves of the King Solomon’s seal look like parchment paper streamers from some festive fairy bash. The purple asters have closed their faces into little disapproving black knots. The tamarack trees are baring their trunks faster than Kappa Kappa Gammas on spring break. But oh, the memories.

Every morning, from May through October, after I sleepily fed the chickens and collected a few eggs, I would wind my way back to the farmhouse along paths edged in flowers. Most of these are herbaceous perennials but we have tubers and bulbs as well. I didn’t plant any of this bounty — I’m just the current caretaker — so I never knew what to expect. Every few days my eyes would light upon some newly emerged bloom that I didn’t recognize, so I’d whip out my phone and upload a pic to my plant identification app.

Now I’m left with my photos. I scroll through them almost as often as I scroll Twitter looking for election updates. Neither is a fruitful exercise.

Instead, let us take a gander through a series of botanical art made by women whose creations will feed your spirit no matter what the season or the vote count.

Anne Blackwell Thompson

Artist Anne Blackwell Thompson harvests flowers and foliage from the swamps of South Carolina, the gardens of Virginia’s countryside, the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, and the mountains of the Shenandoah Valley and then preserves her finds using centuries-old traditions, creating beautiful portraits of the natural world. Her meticulous preservation and artistic presentation turn her botanical treasures into highly stylized works of art.

Mary Delany

Mary Delany, born in 1700, was twice-widowed and seventy-two years old when she took her scissors to a piece of scarlet tissue sitting on her bedside table. The English lady of society made over 985 "paper-mosaicks” as she called them. Her botanical collages, made of tissue paper and glue, were so accurate, that Kew Garden botanist Joseph Banks claimed they were the only imitations of nature he had seen from which one could ‘describe botanically any plant without the least fear of committing an error’. They are now housed at The British Musuem. More about Mary Delany here.

Ann Wood

Ann Wood of Minneapolis-based Woodlucker was sitting at her dying father’s bedside when he commented on the beauty of the plants outside his window. After her father’s death, she struggled in her artistic practice. But his last words stayed with her, and the artist began dissecting plants. Then, using wires, paper and cutting with embroidery scissors, Wood began creating one-of-a-kind flowers that are true to the form and scale of the original plant model. Her series has grown to include fruits, vegetables (which she sometimes finds humorous), and insects. An accomplished photographer, she has leveraged Instagram to amplify her audience, which today is over 133,000 followers. Currently, her botanical wall is on display at The Kuntsmuseum, The Hague, in the Netherlands.

Pip Spiro

Pip Spiro is a Brisbane artist best known for her vivid, large scale botanical and still life paintings. She is inspired by her surroundings and her Queensland childhood. She hopes to make artwork that creates space for a simple appreciation of and connection with beauty.

Tiffanie Turner

Tiffanie Turner resides and works in San Francisco, creating floral sculptures and bouquets from crepe paper. She experiments with scale, and many of her flowers are sized for science fiction landscapes. Regarding her process, she says, “I am forever moved by the specimens found in nature, the dynamism of a flower on the stem and in the vase, changing with the season or by the day, here one month then gone for the next eleven.” She believes that the familiarity and accessibility of flowers allows an “easy in” for people. In fact, she has written a how-to guide to making paper flowers that I’ve just ordered.

The Lone Wolf

If you can find information and background on Instagram user @derletztwolf, you are a super sleuth. After scouring every photo in this artist’s feed, using Google translate on captions, searching on Facebook, and using various search bars, I know as much now as I did when I first came across this Instagram account. All I can say is these Baroque-esque photographs are mesmerizing.

Kristen Meyer

Kristen Meyer is a multimedia artist currently residing in New Haven, CT with her husband and two daughters. She has worked in floral design, interior decorating, window design and prop styling. Her complex and lovely flat lay compositions make me wonder how many pair of tweezers she owns.

Megumi Shinozaki

Japanese artist and florist Megumi Shinozaki of Edenworks creates her paper flowers using Naoron paper construction. This means her artwork is waterproof and tear resistant.

Livia Cetti

Artist Livia Cetti of the Green Vase creates various paper flowers, from single stems to larger potted paper plants in her studio in Bronx, NY. Growing up in the mountains north of Santa Barbara with a creative family helped define Livia's botanical taste. Now she’s the country’s premiere paper-flower artist, known for her high-style tissue and crepe-paper flowers—which are often mistaken for real floral bouquets.

Source: The Green Vase

Thank you for reading today! Now tell me, do you have a favorite flower? Has your favorite flower changed since you were a child?