Paradise Garden was a surprise...
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All of the concepts and the sketches for our Spring/Summer 22 collection were finalized and already a very full group. I remember taking advantage of a lovely and oddly warm mid-October afternoon, watching the chickens wildly run around catching late season grasshoppers. I was thinking about how soon winter would be arriving and realized how quickly my thoughts were already turning to the joys of welcoming spring. Aside from the excessive mud here in Wyoming, I welcome everything about spring with wide open arms. And truth be told, I even get excited to finally see mud too!
Like our Songbirds collection from last year, flowers are symbols of spring and an all out sensory delight. I was immediately inspired to sketch some of my favorite flowers as I sat enjoying the moment that October afternoon. My Virgo brain generally overrides spontaneity in design, and my need for symmetry and organization wins over capturing the essence of a feeling or memory. I have a hard time allowing myself to retain the sketchiness of a concept through to the final result of making an end product. As I organize elements and motifs into repeats, a rigidity takes over as the general dominant directive in fine tuning. And that is what makes Paradise Garden so unique and so unapologetically full and fun to me!
Without much of a plan, I just drew some of my favorite flowers in a more exploratory way without being overly burdened with the final outcome. I thought about which flowers I love (from a color and smell standpoint) and which flowers I haven't had a chance to draw yet (some of which simply make me overjoyed and HAPPY.) I permitted this more stream of consciousness, emotional approach to lead me to the drawing and layout finalization, without the same level of logic and self assigned responsibility for accurate depiction to take over.
I enjoyed creating this design, and felt that it would be a good one in the end, however, I was absolutely WOWed when the first sample came in! The unbridled feeling of walking through an incredibly wild botanical dreamscape, harnessing a collection of decades worth of memories of spring and summer blooms boldly sings at top volume in this floral celebration! The only thing that is missing is smells!
We do not get the growing opportunities to have many of the Paradise Garden flowers in our own arid desert high altitude "yard.” I will continue to enjoy the flowers vicariously through some of our favorite floral designers: