California native plant bouquets from homes around san diego

During the Victorian era, each flower and plant had either a medicinal, spiritual, or emotional meaning. Their meanings became understood widely enough that flowers were used as a form of communication called "Floriography." From the arrangement to the type of individual flowers– everything had meaning. If you were to give someone a rosebud, that signified innocent love, while yellow roses are associated with joy and friendship, and daffodils meant unrequited love. Red roses synonymous with Valentine's Day meant passionate love–and still do today. Even artists of this era would paint specific plants in their paintings to communicate a message to their audience.

In this new era of creating and restoring habitat for California native plants and animals in our front and backyards, we are ushering in a new kind of floriography. Through the work of scientists, conservationists, nurseries, and indigenous wisdom, we know the spiritual, medicinal, and essential purposes behind each California plant and have access to growing our own. This knowledge, in turn, has helped us respect, care for, and connect to the land we walk on and the creatures that make California, California.

These paintings are all bouquets of California native plants from various home gardens in San Diego. They were grown from someone's very own yard, harvested and arranged in a bouquet and given to a friend, a neighbor, or even to me. These bouquets represent a much-needed kind of love for our isolated and distracted world. A love that is about giving our attention to the people, plants, and creatures that immediately surround us. In giving a bouquet full of California native plants, we get to send a message of neighborly and convivial love, so grow and give freely.

"Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healing. To be healed, we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of creation.”
Wendell Berry