Swooning this morning over images from Andrew Zuckerman’s photography book Flower, showcasing his masterful minimalistic images of exotic and not so exotic blooms. He pictures are as lush as those of Robert Mapplethorpe or Georgia O’Keefe, though he arranges his shots without any of their artistic commentary, with his goal to simply get out of the [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=1421
I always miss Wallace Stevens’ birthday—October 2—so this year I’m prematurely tipping my hat to the great poet. Thinking of him this evening, I spent some time rifling around in the archives. I do love him so. And he loved all the good things: snow, poetry, honey, walking, ravens, tea… I found a funny site [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=1305
All summer long I’d been meaning to write about how much I love beekeeping. We got a hive in July and I could sit and watch those little ladies dart in and out with their bags of pollen all afternoon long. We started too late in the season to harvest any honey this year—they needed [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=1236
How is it possible that I have yet to visit Harvard’s glass flowers? My husband has been trying to get me there for years. People I hardly know insist that I go. I’ve read all about the collection and it’s been on my mind for ages. I can almost smell the glass flowers. I’m smitten [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=1204
There may be snow on the ground here in Maine, but the sight of these gorgeous string-flower creations from Amsterdam is making it feel like Spring. I am obsessed. This clever florist has taken the Japanese art of bonasai—and specifically kokedama—to amazing new heights. Follow the link here for a breezy DIY tutorial and a look [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=1196
The great editor and grande dame of New England gardening, Katharine S. White, gives her opinion on dahlias in Encyclopedia of the Exquisite, but she loved this time of year here in Maine almost as much as she did full-blooming July, and for one reason—the seed catalogues. As she explained in her inaugural New Yorker [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=1174
Every time I go to Paris’ Jardin de Luxembourg I have to make sure that it’s there—Rilke’s beloved elephant, going round and round on the park’s carousel, as described in Encyclopedia of the Exquisite. The wooden carousel, created in 1879, were installed in the park in 1904. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was hypnotized by [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=1141
If I lived nearer to the Paris flea market I’d start collecting antique silk flowers, of the sort that used to bedeck the world’s prettiest hats. It’s said that in 1775 Marie Antoinette was presented with a silk rosebud that was so breathtakingly pretty that she fainted on the spot. (Some nimble-fingered soul also reportedly [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=908
I want to rip up our boring lawn and replace it with a flowery mead, the carpet of tiny flowers you find in Medieval paintings and 15th century tapestries. The smallest blooms—birdsfoot trefoil, thyme, hawkbits, ladies’ bedstraw, self-heal, cowslip, viola, violets, periwinkle, lily of the valley and columbine—were just some of the millefleurs that made [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=642
The tulips are blooming everywhere. You probably know something about the legendary obsession with tulips in old Holland and Flanders, a flowery fad based on bulb-price speculation that briefly drove the local economy in the mid-17th century—until the market crashed. But I only recently realized that the tulip craze, like most sweeping fashions, actually started [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=473
