Introducing: #AYearInFlowers

Hooray for the first day of spring!  

While the spring equinox is always a cause for celebration here on the farm, this week the celebration is even sweeter: I just turned in all the photos for my next book to my publisher!  After nearly a year of work on the book, this is a major milestone worth celebrating!

While my first book, Cut Flower Garden, focused primarily on growing flowers, the next book, A Year In Flowers, will explore creative ways to incorporate homegrown and seasonal flowers into everyday life. The book will feature simple, inspiring ways to bring the beauty of local flowers indoors as well as detailed tutorials on how to replicate some of our seasonal floral designs.

Here are a few “behind the scenes” shots from the making of the book:

Although Chronicle Books hasn’t yet finalized an exact release date yet, we hope to get it into the hands of flower lovers by Valentine’s Day 2020.



Since spring is a time for new beginnings, I thought it would be the perfect time to kick off of a new project I’m calling #ayearinflowers.  

Just as the new book will feature ways to bring the beauty of flowers into our everyday lives, #AYearInFlowers will be a community-driven project to spotlight what is blooming in gardens around the globe each week for the next year. 

I would love to have you join in the fun! 

Here’s how to participate:

1) Capture. Take a photo of flowers that are in season in your area, whether it is a fistful of flowers from your backyard or a bouquet from your local farmers market.

2) Post. On Instagram, upload your photo and tag it with #AYearInFlowers; On Facebook, upload your photo as a comment under my weekly post. 

3) Share. In your photo caption, please share what flowers are featured (if you know them) along with your location and date. Bonus points for listing your USDA hardiness zone and week number.

Even though this will be the first week of the project, we’ll use the week number of the year to designate each post. For example, this is the 12th week of the year, so I’ll tag my post #AYearInFlowers and #Week12Flowers. Week numbers are commonly used in the floriculture industry and are standardized across the years. Plus, tagging the week number will allow Instagram users to sort photos by week and compare what’s blooming each week from year to year.

Longtime Floret readers will likely remember the 2013 Seasonal Bouquet Project. The collaboration started as a long-distance dare between flower friends whereby Jennie Love of Love n’ Fresh Flowers and I challenged each other to make a bouquet once a week for the entire season using only local flowers. Living on opposite coasts with different climates and cultures, we wanted to see what was blooming in one another’s garden each week and keep creatively connected during the roller coaster that is the flower season. The project’s tagline was “Two designers, two farms, two coasts + double dog dare.”

Once a week, we designed, photographed and posted bouquets harvested from her 2-acre urban farm in Philadelphia and Floret’s 2-acre plot in Washington’s Skagit Valley. It was a fun year-long collaboration that inspired other flower lovers to play along and also share their weekly bouquets.

The success of that year-long collaboration inspired a similar follow-up project, the Seasonal Flower Alliance in 2015. Four years later, more than 91,000 flowery posts feature the #seasonalfloweralliance hashtag. What an incredibly beautiful testimonial to the level of interest in seasonal flowers!

Each week of the #AYearInFlowers project I will choose a handful of submissions from both Instagram and Facebook and showcase them here on the blog.

Please join me in this creative, community-driven project to celebrate seasonal flowers this spring and all year long. 

I can’t wait to see what’s blooming near you!