FLORA MAGNIFICA: THE ART OF FLOWERS IN FOUR SEASONS

This sumptuous book is more than a reference work or a collection of beautiful flowers. It is the product of a longstanding symbiotic collaboration between renowned flower artist Makoto Azuma and botanical photographer Shunsuke Shiinoki. Working together, they have selected hundreds of plant species and arranged them in striking combinations that could never exist in the natural world, creating a unique, fantastical floral aesthetic.

The result is a series of dense, luxuriant images, rich in color 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.