Inspired Reading: Flora Magnifica

Inspired Reading: Flora Magnifica

If you, like us at Scent Lodge, are obsessed with the beauty of floral fragrances, you’ll want to pick up Flora Magnifica: The Art of Flowers in Four Seasons. It is quite simply one of the most beautiful books we’ve ever seen. Renowned floral artist Makoto Azuma painstaking layers and combines blooms and greenery into lush images that botanical photographer Shunsuke shoots. The attention to detail is astounding and the process is much like how a master perfumer creates a modern-day floral fragrance. Each flower is carefully chosen and paired into a tapestry of colour and texture. The pair selected hundreds of plant species and arranged them into striking combinations that could never exist in the natural world, creating a unique, fantastical floral aesthetic.

You’ll find a series of dense, luxuriant images, rich in colour and texture, in which nature and artifice are skillfully mingled. The book is organized thematically by season: the freshness and new life of spring, the exuberance and abundance of summer, the fading grandeur of fall, and the deepening shadows of winter. Recalling the opulent still-life paintings of the seventeenth century, the photographs not only capture the surface beauty of the flowers, but suggest the burgeoning life brimming within them as well as its transience.

Why not take experience reading this book to a new level by creating your own fragrances based on each image. You could layer your favourite floral fragrances creating a scent that best evokes the spirit, colour and mood of each photograph. This is a trend that popped up in Europe about eight years ago where perfume houses created art installations to reflect specific eau de parfums. But we love the idea of creating unique scents based on these images. It’s where floral arranging, photography and fragrance merge.

Flora Magnifica: The Art of Flowers in Four Season by Makoto Azuma and Shunsuke Shiinoki is available at amazon.ca

---

More Scent Lodge Stories You Might Enjoy