On the table, there sits a rose...

I've been quite obsessed with this Diana Ross song for a while now; maybe because it resonates with my domestic (read interior decorator's) instincts or just because it's super catchy and positive (well, that also).

I love having flowers and plants around - you probably already noticed all the arrangements in the shop photos.

My approach is pretty instictive - I don't follow any aranging rules and try and use seasonal plants; I also use vintage glasswear and improvise with jars a lot. I'd love to do something a little more professional with this one day.

Lately I've been trying to document them better, especially since I got my proper film camera back.

So here are a few summer bouquets I shot with this gorgeous warm August light.

Can't wait to get my new rolls back from the lab! 

I might just turn this into a regular thing :)

Fancy Florals - ranunculus and supermarket roses

I always had a thing for floral arangements; well, maybe not so much for arrangements as for flowers in general.

I never liked the neat, long stemmed flowers, neigther the standard half-dead roses - I was more into wild flowers or stolen garden roses with short stems I would put in jars and tiny old milk bottles.

From what I see on Pinterest now, this type of floral style is gaining quite some popularity; I always wanted to document my bouquets outside my art projects, so setting up the "studio room" for a new vintage goodies shoot (more on that soon) seemes like a good opportunity.

As much as everyone in Europe likes showing contempt towards Valentine's Day, last evening going into Dia (the cheapest ghetto grocery store in France; tho they have good plants) after a thrifting session to get icecream, I ended up buying roses - two bouquets for the price of one! Now that's what I call effective capitalism!

At least the cashier lady was nice enough to shout at my absent-minded-disco-blasting-in-my-headphones self about the offer. I also ended up buying an air plant! (or rather rescuing it, considering the poor thing was GLUED to this fugly ceramic claw-like structure -who does that??)

Funny thing is that right as I went up I realized I had forgotten my thrift store bag, then ran down and stood in a big line at Picard among local couples stocking up on gourmet frozen food; I guess I wasn't the only one having Picard for V-day dinner, not that I really cared.

So having all this flowers super-motivated me to take photos today; I'm pretty happy with the result, although I think this little setup might be the best thing about it. Also I had the ranunculus for 2 weeks already, crazy how two of these guys are still alive!

Enjoy these for now and who knows, I might actually turn this into a regular thing!

 

Session de rattrapage : Fete des jardins 2013 (on film)

The winter cold has finally hit me this year and I spent the last 2 days in bed drinking hot herbal infusions and OJ... But this gave me time to go through the last batch of very old film rolls I recently scanned and discover these lovely shots. 

Leslie Knope would have loved it in France; I'm not talking about the Camembert and macarons here, but about all the government-sponsored events.

I know everyone loves Fete de la musique and Nuit Blanche, but too me that's just too much noise and drunk people in the street.

What I love is Fete des jardins - a yearly celebration that takes place in all the parks and gardens in Paris and the suburbs.

I might have mentioned it before and it truly is the best thing ever for a nature-hungry urbanite like me.

I discovered it in 2011 strictly by chance when going to the Parc Floral right after coming back from my Romanian summer sojourn.

It takes place around the 20th of September, when the weather is usually nice and warm, with a certain summer vibe lingering.

I haven't been to many other celebratory spots, but after carefully scanning the program this year, Parc Floral still seemed like the best bet. In the end it's a beautiful botanical garden, you get free entrance, maybe some nice music and always free plants.

By now I know the two little games that win you plants, though I must confess it was more fun the previous year.

There's still stuff to discover, like the building your fake garden in sand workshop for kids that I just had to take part in!

My favourite thing this year was actually in the Dahlia expo, which I normally don't pay much attention to, but these darkly leafed hybrids with movie names were an instant crush.

I mean how awesome would it be to receive a bouquet of Star Wars with a dash of Taxi Driver?

If I was ever to create a floral variety, it would be a super scented garden rose in pale pink called The Long Goodbye. Or an almost black freesia called La maman et la putain.

But enough reminiscing for now. I'll be preparing a new batch of vintage items for next week, so keep your eyes peeled!

Disposable Diary : blossoms and florals

... I know I shouldn't recycle last year's snapshots, but looking through my old tumblr (and considering how long it takes me to get my films developed) this little ensemble seemed to capture the mood of this season perfectly: gloomy summer.

Above is a lovely pink magnolia found in the Marais, the sunset over the Asnieres bridge overlooking Nanterre, my bedroom curtain ( and bruised legs from carrying gear), one of those amazing floral chandeliers during a concert at Henri's amazing apartment and another beautiful magnolia in this little park by INHA.

I can't wait to see what treasures I'll uncover in the new batch I'm finally taking to the lab next week!

Monday Musings: Succulents, stolen roses and daisy fields

 fresh cuttings I'm trying to root...

This is not gonna turn into a gardening blog, but the thing is I love flowers! And plants in general.

Lately I started having a little more plants at home, as well as reading and learning about taking care of them.

In Romania the tradition is that everyone's mum has a lot of house plants. It's just one of those things that mums do, you don't even think about it that much.

I guess it just dawned on me when a friend came by and she was like oh, you have a green thumb!

I wouldn't really put it that way, but I guess it's mostly due to our particularly sunny apartment (such a rare thing around here).

So I started reading more, found out that the crazy plant we've had for ages is actually a succulent!

Now succulents are a BIG trend right now and i'm pretty surprised i didn't notice it earlier. part of the attraction is also the fact that now a lot of hardware stores started carrying the craziest variations for really cheap! The other factor must be the gorgeous creative displays.

My friends from Romania were telling me how the trend is evolving there as well. What I don't know if anyone noticed is that those exotic succulents are pretty much the same plants used in those horrid communist garden arrangements that spelled city names!

Some species of succulents have been around for quite a while, although not under this classification, such as portulaca, which is one of my mum's favorite flowers.

Probably the most amazing thing about succulents is when they bloom - especially this little guy who first looked like it was covered in spiderwebs (probably a Sempervivum arachnoideum) that has now bloomed with the most fascinating alien flowers.

The other cool thing about succulents is that they're super easy to propagate by cutting, which in turn made me obsessed with pinching little samples of new species from public gardens. I don't if these two have any chances of growing, but they just look so cool!

I love it when the place is full of flowers and this time between mid May and early June is just perfect for finding free stuff like wild flowers and stealing an occasional municipal garden rose (Leslie Knope would most definitely put my picture on a John Ford-like WANTED poster for that!).

 

 

 

Maybe this bad habit has been nurtured by growing up in a small town in Transylvania, being close to nature and picking huge daisy bouquets from the fields. I love it when the grass grows super tall and full of flowers, just before the cutting. I mean, all those flowers will turn into hay, so why not take a few home?

And last but not least,some lovely gardening reads I stumbled upon : Lovely Greens and You Grow Girl.  You probably know both these ladies and their amazing gardening skills but if you don't you're in for a treat.

Been finding a lot of things for the boutique lately, I'm preparing another update this Saturday. It's so much nicer to be working in a home filled with flowers!

Do you guys have a succulent collection? What kind of flowers do you like?