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Flora Culture
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Flora Culture: How Flowers Shape Our World

Author Christin Geall

Groundbreaking, unique, and beautiful, Flora Culture: How Flowers Shape Our World features over 250 images from over 40 countries, taking readers on a journey across cultures and continents in search of a deeper understanding of how we might live with plants on a changing planet.

Our love of flowers and desire to be close to them has, across cultures and for millennia, created both landscapes and livelihoods. In this book, Christin Geall covers hot topics such as aesthetics, appropriation, fair trade, floriculture, globalization, indigeneity, modernism, seasonality, and tokenism—to name only a few of the over eighty entries presented here in an accessible A to Z format.

In her inimitable style, Geall shares personal stories and ideas from growers and designers, weaving her narratives between art, ecology, and history to get readers truly thinking about their relationships to plants, gardens, and design.

About The Author

Christin Geall is an acclaimed writer, designer, and photographer whose work focuses on the intersections of nature, culture, and horticulture. She is the author of Cultivated: The Elements of Floral Style. Following the success of her first book, she now turns her attention to our global relationships with flowers and plants.

  • Publish Date: April 07, 2026
  • Format: Trade Paperback Original
  • Category: Gardening - Flowers - General
  • Publisher: Rizzoli
  • Trim Size: 8 x 10
  • Pages: 304
  • US Price: $45.00
  • CDN Price: $60.00
  • ISBN: 978-0-8478-7613-6
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Reviews

“To open Christin's new book is to plunge into a lush, provocative world of plants and flowers, where murky political intrigue and heartbreaking exploitation intertwine with sheer botanical magic, bursting with joy and colour. Every page offers a mesmerisingly beautiful journey through time and across continents, revealing not just the wonder of plants, but the tangled roots of power, beauty, and survival that connect us all."
— Sophie Conran

“Few understand the depths of our dependence upon flowers in culture, art, medicine, religion, agriculture, and as drivers of our livelihoods better than Christin Geall. The
narrative challenges us to embrace a new vision of floriculture grounded in current reality and informed by a hopeful future. The ideas are thoughtfully interwoven throughout the pages, offering glimpses and inspiration into the countless ways flowers directly and indirectly influence our lives, worldwide.”
— Uli Lorimer, Director of Horticulture, Native Plant Trust, Ask The Gardener columnist, The Boston Globe, author of The Northeast Native Plant Primer- 235 Plants for an Earth-Friendly Garden (Timber Press)

“How rare, in this age of simplification, to find a book that takes pleasure in using arcane words as well as thought-provoking pictures. Pick a page at random from this floral compendium and immerse yourself in Christin Geall’s world of ideas.”
— Kendra Wilson, Gardenista, Author of Gardenista: The Low Impact Garden (Artisan)

“Author, designer, and cultural critic (in the largest sense of this word), Christin Geall is at it again. After leading engaged readers on a delightful and intellectual exploration of floral design as fine art and enterprise in her first book, Cultivated, The Elements of Floral Style, her newest title, Flora Culture, How Flowers Shape Our World (April 2026, Rizzolli) takes on the good, bad, ugly, and transcendant about our very ancient and very contemporary human love of flowers. She dives into, analyzes, questions, and ultimately gets us, the readers, to see how this human love of flowers might be thoughtfully reimagined "to accommodate present realities—both scientific and cultural,” so that "our desire, our very love of plants and flowers” does less harm and more good through greater understanding.”
— Jennifer Jewell, Host and founder of Cultivating Place, Conservation on Natural History and the Impulse to Garden, a coproduction of Northstate Public Radio; author of What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultiral Significance of Seeds (Timber Press); Under Western Skies: Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast (Timber Press) and The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants (Timber Press)

“I cannot remember when I’ve been more dazzled, delighted, or beguiled by a book, particularly one about flowers, though it is about so much more: horticulture, humanity, culture, capitalism, and the power and voice of choices we make every day.”
— Frances Schultz, author The Bee Cottage Story

“A fascinating journey through an alphabet of botanical lore. Filled fun facts, critical definitions, and the political context of common and arcane horticultural concepts. A beautiful and joyous read”.
— Rebecca McMackin, ecological horticulturist and TED speaker