On Flowers, Colour & Living With Things | The Sunday Journal No.7
This week seemed to revolve, unexpectedly, around flowers.
As I started to plant up three large planters I placed on the communal steps of our building, I began to think about the idea of living alongside colour, seasonality and the small rituals of paying attention to beautiful things.
I recently went to two very different events on the same theme at Topping & Company Booksellers. The first was for Sean A. Pritchard discussing Atmosfloric - a beautiful book filled with extraordinary planting combinations and slightly dreamlike gardens that seem to dissolve the boundary between cultivated and wild.
The second was with Sarah Raven for her new book A Year of Cut Flowers.
What struck me sitting through both conversations was how much they weren’t really about gardening at all!
They were about colour. About atmosphere. About how we choose to shape the spaces around us and the emotional effect that has on everyday life.
I’ve followed Sarah Raven’s work for years and, during a brief but fairly committed allotment phase, became completely absorbed in growing flowers purely for cutting. Buckets of dahlias, armfuls of sweet peas, things grown less for the garden itself than for the pleasure of bringing them indoors afterwards.
Adam's cut flower garden, Totnes, 2022.
There’s something oddly optimistic about cut flowers and Sarah was keen to stress that flowers grown and picked in the correct way, contributes to longer flowering and healthier plants.
A beautiful dahlia from Adam's cut flower garden, 2022
Listening to both talks this week, I was reminded how instinctive colour can be when people speak passionately about the things they love. Sean talks about planting in a way that feels almost painterly - layers, contrast, softness, interruption. Sarah approaches flowers grown less for the garden and more for productiveness and means to create extraordinary floral arrangements.
It made me think about how people live with art too.
Not in the obvious “matching the sofa cushions” sense, but in the quieter decision to surround yourself with things that alter the feeling of a room. Colour has a strange ability to change mood, pace, even memory. A vase of sweet peas does it temporarily. A painting perhaps does it more slowly, but for longer.
Blue Jug with a White Petal, Audrey Henderson, 2026. Available at The Torrance Gallery.
We often notice it in the gallery with floral paintings especially. People respond to them almost immediately - not necessarily because they’re “about flowers”, but because they carry something familiar with them: abundance, seasonality, domestic life, the memory of gardens, certain times of year.
Perhaps that’s why they endure.
Chasing Blooms, Charmaine Boyle, 2026. Available at The Torrance Gallery.
Or perhaps, after a week spent thinking about dahlias, sweet peas and wildly theatrical planting schemes, I’m simply seeing flowers everywhere.
Until next Sunday, Adam