We seek inspiration to create great gardens, but they can also serve as the inspiration for artwork. This section includes information about writing, photography, illustration, and other art forms that were inspired by plants, nature, and gardens.
When I was working on my book, Grow Curious, I decided that I would include a pressed leaf or flower from my garden in random copies of the book. If you bought a print copy, please turn to page 87 to see if you got one. Pressed hosta leaf from my garden. I’ve pressed many …
Saturday was dark and rainy, the sort of day that you spend indoors huddled up, moving slowly, drinking warm liquids, binging on movies or a series, and making stuff. Just the day before, I discovered the Craft in America documentary series, which is probably how I came to the conclusion that it was a good …
Here’s a simple Grow Curious project for you to do in celebration of May Day and the growing season ahead. Collect flowers* from your garden. Choose one of each kind if you can. Assemble them in an arrangement, either laid down flat (aka a flat lay), together in a single vase, or as I have …
With the garden season winding down or gearing up depending on your location, now is a time when many of us are getting back into the garden after some time off. I thought it would be fun to take advantage of the seasonal shift and start a community Grow Curious project that anyone can do, …
Please allow me to introduce the second embroidery project in our You Grow Girl Makes series for plant and garden lovers. This fall themed wall hanging was inspired, in part, by a surprise gift of 300 pounds of pumpkin that was delivered to my door last fall. The experience gave me the opportunity to taste …
When I last wrote here about dyeing with plants it was June and I had been experimenting with fresh coreopsis flowers. Despite reports that cotton fibres CAN NOT be dyed with coreopsis flowers, I was able to use the gleanings from my garden successfully without using mordants (a fixative that allows the dye to bind …
Introducing our newest collaboration, You Grow Girl Makes and our first project in the series, Tomatoes Worth Growing, a 12″ x 12″ embroidered pillow (or wall hanging) dedicated to some of my favourite heirloom tomatoes. In the off-season, when the garden is put to bed and I am resigned to longer hours spent indoors, I …
Late last summer I tossed a few flowers from the garden into jars and covered them with boiling water to make a “colour tea.” I then tossed in little bits of cotton thread to see what would happen. This wasn’t about anything that I had read in a book. I didn’t use any mordants. I …
Header hand drawn by Davin Risk Over the last year I’ve posted about some of my experiments in dyeing fabrics and threads with plants gleaned from my garden to be used in my winter, off-season stitching projects. Since then I have expanded beyond my own garden to use plant materials foraged from the world beyond. …
I was browsing through some of my old photos this morning and happened upon this one, taken on a trip to New York City back in May 2005 when I was promoting my first book. Looking at this image now, on a cold winter day, the soil long ago buried underneath snow, fills me with …
I found this hand painted postcard at a vintage paper show. It is dated on the back, December 18, 1941 and was sent to Long Island, USA from New York City.
Herbal bundles are tightly bound rolls of dried woody, resinous herbs, that are slowly burned as a way to purify and cleanse the air. The roots of burning an herbal bundle, or smudging, is in indigenous purification rites and ceremony that span the world globally. It is not a homogeneous practice, and since I am …