Beautiful Blooms Behind the Scenes

Bonjour, mes amis! My new book, Beautiful Blooms, releases in less than three weeks! Authors are responsible for the bulk of marketing and promotion of their works and those activities have been occupying me for some months.

I thought you’d enjoy seeing some of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating content to be shared on social media, in publications and provided to publishers. To showcase the book in a variety of scenes, I purchased flowers from a wonderful local shop, Oz Garden, in shades that matched the book cover, and in some cases were the very same flowers that were used in the original book cover arrangement.

These gorgeous Juliet roses are a focal feature of the cover so I felt I had to give them a prominent role in the marketing materials.

I also picked up an armful of gorgeous fresh lilacs from another florist on Rue du Bac. Lilacs (and Lily of the Valley) were my mother’s favorites, so their incredible fragrance always makes me feel she is with me with when I work with them.

No make up and rain-soaked hair but always happiest when smothered with flowers.

For the first project, I wanted to do a flat lay of the cover, surrounded by the flowers. Now, here is my pro tip! Most people, when creating a flat lay, will chop the heads off the flowers in order to arrange them on a flat surface. I never do this, if at all avoidable. Flowers are very expensive and I like to get plenty of use out of them in multiple styling scenarios, such as a bouquet for a calendar client, a simple arrangement for a greeting card and so on. Therefore, my technique for the last many years is to suspend the flower stems through an elevated grate or grid. When I was on the road regularly, I would use an oven rack from wherever I was staying. For my US studio, David built me a large wooden frame and attached chicken wire, which worked so well. It was too large to bring to Paris but now I have this wonderful metal table with a woven lattice pattern. I can drop the stems of the flowers through the holes and voila! A beautiful flat lay with the flowers still intact!

In close up, you can see the that flowers are nestled tightly, as if they were cut off from the stem. But they aren’t! (and notice the perfect match of the lilacs and pale mauve flowers with their counterpart on the cover.) Below is the final image which will be seen in social media posts, newsletters and picked up by publishers.

And here are the flowers, after the above shoot, intact and in perfect shape for a gorgeous urn arrangement, which will be sent to my calendar publisher. And they were still looking great for use in yet another arrangement of small jars the next day.

If you, like me, hate sacrificing perfectly good flowers for a flat lay, you should try this. You can use anything with holes large enough for the stems to pass through but not large enough for the bloom to fall through. Suspend it between two buckets or tables so there is enough height for the stems to hang down. Work quickly, as your stems will be out of water. Roses, tulips and other thick-stemmed flowers can stay out of water for awhile without wilting, but lilacs are delicate and need to be returned to water as quickly as possible.

I hope you found this interesting and useful! Let me know if this is something you’d try with your own arrangements.

À bientôt!

xo

G