New Beginnings: On Being Featured in Flower Magazine
There are moments in a creative's life, even after twenty five years, that still make you smile with delight. Being featured in Flower Magazine this month, with my image New Beginnings and an accompanying interview about my two series, Young Girl in Bloom and Rewilding, is one of those moments for me.
I wanted to share the story behind the image, the magazine that gave it a home in this issue, and why this feature means as much to me as it does.
The Story Behind New Beginnings
New Beginnings was photographed on the Ile St Louis in Paris. In it, a young girl stands quietly, almost hidden, behind an enormous, joyous bunch of dahlias, a moment suspended just before she takes her first step into whatever comes next.
I dedicated this photograph to anyone standing at the edge of a new beginning. That particular stretch of time has its own strange, specific mix of feelings: excitement, a little fear, a stubborn thread of hope, and the sense of leaving darker days behind you. I wanted the image to hold all of that at once, the girl isn't rushing forward. She's pausing, gathering herself, enjoying the moment before everything changes. She already knows, somehow, that glorious days are ahead.
New Beginnings is part of my series Young Girl in Bloom, a body of work inspired by that fleeting, in-between age, no longer a child, not yet a woman, when girls stand on the edge of their own greatness without quite realizing it yet. Every photograph in the series was created with real young women in mind: girls who are innately powerful and beautiful but who so often can't see it in themselves yet. Each image carries a name that reflects that inner journey: I Believe in Me, Great Future Ahead, On My Way, Standing Her Ground. My hope has always been that these images might help other women, young and old, look inward, recognize their own worth, and tap into the strength they already carry. Because when a young girl is truly in bloom, when she knows her own value — she becomes one of the most powerful forces there is.
New Beginnings is available as a limited edition fine art print, hand-numbered and issued with a certificate of authenticity, in sizes from 16 x 24 inches up to 36 x 54 inches. You can view the full print here.
From Young Girl in Bloom to Rewilding
In the Flower Magazine interview, I also had the chance to talk about where this journey led next, into my newest collection, Rewilding.
If Young Girl in Bloom was about a girl standing at the threshold of who she might become, Rewilding feels like that same girl, grown up, asking a different question: what does it mean to return to yourself? This series is a botanical allegory, built from two kinds of flowers, wild blooms that represent our instinctive, untamed nature, and cultivated garden flowers that represent the parts of us shaped and disciplined by life. Suspended against deep, atmospheric backgrounds, the images sit somewhere between alive and contemplative, and the whole collection is really about balance, not choosing between the wild and the cultivated, but letting both exist in the same frame.
It was, in many ways, a much more personal series to make than I expected. It came from a season of my life when I was searching for something slower and less action-driven, and picking up my camera again to chase down flowers I'd never photographed before became a way of finding my way back to myself.
Explore the Rewilding collection here.
About Flower Magazine
I'm especially glad this feature landed with Flower Magazine, a publication I've long admired. Flower describes itself as the nation's only floral lifestyle publication, and reading an issue, you can feel that focus, everything in its pages, from home tours to gardens to travel to the tastemakers of the floral and design world, is filtered through a distinctly botanical point of view.
The magazine was founded in 2007 by Margot Shaw, a Birmingham, Alabama native who came to publishing sideways, through years of working alongside floral and event designers while planning her own daughter's wedding. Unable to find a magazine that spoke to her particular passion for flowers, gardens, and the artistry behind them, she decided to create one herself. Flower has grown steadily ever since, moving from a quarterly to a bimonthly publication in 2016, and it's now read in all 50 states and 17 countries, with its headquarters still in Birmingham.
It felt fitting to have New Beginnings, a photograph so literally about flowers and the courage to step forward, find its place in a magazine built by someone who followed her own unexpected new beginning into a floral life of her own.
Thank You
To everyone who has followed Young Girl in Bloom from its earliest images, to those who have sent me lovely messages and made a home for one or two of them on your walls. To those just discovering Rewilding for the first time, thank you for being part of this. Being able to share these stories in a magazine that so many flower lovers turn to each month is a genuine honor.
If you'd like to read the full interview, you can find it on Flower Magazine's website. And if New Beginnings or any image from Rewilding speaks to you, I'd love for it to find a home in yours.
With gratitude,
