The practice of keeping a flower journal — a hybrid of sketchbook, diary, and living herbarium — has quietly taken root among designers, growers, and anyone seeking a deeper dialogue with the botanical world. Studios such as JamJar Flowers in London and the workshop spaces of Anna Potter at Swallows & Damsons have long championed the habit, and it now flourishes from the Instagram feeds of floral artists to the pages of specialist stationers like Choosing Keeping in Covent Garden.
Choosing Your Tools: Paper, Pigment, and Purpose
Begin with a sketchbook that can handle light washes without buckling. Stillman & Birn’s Zeta series, available at Cass Art and many independent art shops, offers heavyweight, smooth paper ideal for mixed media. For a more organic feel, Khadi Papers produce cotton rag journals with a soft, deckled edge that takes watercolour and ink beautifully. A graphite pencil — Faber-Castell 9000 in 2B — gives a sensitive line, while a waterproof fineliner such as Sakura Pigma Micron prevents smudging when you add colour.
Watercolour remains the most portable and expressive medium. A travel palette from Winsor & Newton, filled with half pans of permanent rose, sap green, and French ultramarine, lets you mix nearly any floral hue. If you prefer dry colour, Caran d’Ache water-soluble pencils allow for swift sketching and can be activated later with a brush dipped in water. Store everything in a simple canvas pouch — the Pencil Case from Present & Correct in Bloomsbury is a favourite among journal keepers — and your kit is ready for any outing.
Equally important is a small ruler, a piece of blotting paper to press between pages, and a roll of washi tape from MT Masking Tape to affix fallen petals or seed heads. These humble additions turn your journal into a portable laboratory of observation.
What to Capture: A Framework for Looking
A flower journal is only as rich as the details you record. Every entry should start with the date, the common and botanical name of the bloom, and its provenance — a roadside verge, the Saturday stall at Columbia Road Flower Market, a neighbour’s allotment. Then, describe the shape: are the petals ruffled like a parrot tulip, cupped like a ranunculus, or spidery like a Cleome hassleriana?
Note the scent with as much precision as you can summon. Is it sweet and honeyed, like a Philadelphus, or sharp and peppery, like dianthus? Record the way light falls on the bloom at different hours, how the stem arcs in the vase, and any insect visitors that arrive. The colour, too, deserves more than a single word: a pink peony might shift from a pale blush at the petal’s base to a deep raspberry at its edge, a shift that can only be captured by mixing colour directly on the page.
Do not neglect the imperfections — a torn leaf, a spot of botrytis, the way a petal curls as it fades. These small truths make your journal a document of living, not a catalogue of perfection. At the end of each entry, jot down a personal note: a memory triggered by the scent, a line of poetry that came to mind, or simply the temperature of the day.
Drawing and Painting: Quick Studies, Not Masterpieces
Botanical painter Billy Showell often reminds students that drawing a flower is a form of listening. “You begin to see the architecture,” she says, “the way petals overlap, the subtle shift in colour from base to tip — details a photograph never truly reveals.”
Approach the page with speed and curiosity. A thirty-second blind contour drawing — where your eye follows the outline of the flower while your pencil never leaves the page — loosens the hand and trains the eye. Follow this with a gestural watercolour wash: wet the petal shape with clean water, then drop in pigment and watch it bloom. This technique, taught in workshops at Kew Gardens and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, captures the luminous, transparent quality of petals far better than a carefully filled-in shape.
If painting feels intimidating, press a small flower or leaf directly onto the page. After recording its fresh state, place it between two sheets of blotting paper and slip it under a heavy book. A week later, tape the dried specimen into your journal with a small strip of washi tape. The pressed form becomes a tactile reference, and its faded colours tell a story of time passing.
For those who prefer a graphic style, a fine black pen and a simple technique of stippling — building up tone with tiny dots — can create exquisite botanical studies with no paint at all. The key is to work in short sessions: ten minutes a day yields far more insight than a single marathon effort.
Words as Petals: Writing Your Observations
Your journal need not rely on imagery alone. A well-chosen phrase can fix a bloom in memory more firmly than any sketch. When you bring home a bunch of sweet peas from New Covent Garden Market, write not just “frilly petals, purple and pink” but “the colour of a bruise on an apricot, with a scent like honeyed almonds.” This practice of precise description is one that floral designer Constance Spry advocated in her teaching: she required students to keep notebooks of descriptive adjectives before they ever touched a stem.
Beyond physical description, capture the emotional landscape. Did the flower remind you of a grandmother’s garden? Did it lift a low mood? The Flower Appreciation Society, founded by Anna Day and Ellie Jauncey, encourages journalers to note the “flower feeling” — a subjective response that later becomes a powerful design tool. You might even copy out a few lines from a poem that the bloom evokes; the works of Mary Oliver or John Clare sit beautifully alongside pressed petals.
If you are so inclined, develop a personal vocabulary for repeats and patterns. Over time, you will notice that you reach for certain words again and again — “velvet,” “translucent,” “papery” — and these become the signature of your seeing.
Seasonal Diaries: Building a Year-Round Practice
A flower journal gains its greatest value when kept across the seasons. In summer, document the heavy-headed roses from David Austin’s display gardens and the towering delphiniums at Great Dixter. As autumn arrives, turn your attention to seed heads, hips, and the burnished tones of chrysanthemums at the Marché aux Fleurs in Nice. Winter offers the stark beauty of hellebores and bare branches; spring, the fleeting profusion of blossom at the Cherry Blossom Festival in Kyoto or the magnolias in Regent’s Park.
By tracking what blooms where and when, your journal becomes a living phenological record. This data is invaluable if you plan a cutting garden or design seasonal arrangements. The floral artist Flora Starkey uses her own notebooks to map colour palettes across the year, ensuring that her installations feel authentically rooted in the moment. You can do the same: when a client or a friend asks for a bouquet that feels like early June, your journal will tell you exactly which blooms to combine.
To build the habit, tie your journaling to a weekly ritual. Every Sunday after visiting your local flower market, sit for half an hour with a cup of tea and a single stem. Or align your entries with the lunar calendar, recording the blooms that appear under each new moon. The structure makes the practice sustainable.
From Page to Vase: How Journaling Informs Design
The act of drawing a flower, or writing about it in detail, sharpens your ability to see its sculptural potential. Designer Emily Thompson, whose New York studio creates wildly romantic installations, sketches her concepts directly into a journal before sourcing materials. “The drawing reveals the gesture,” she explains. “You see the weight, the line, the way a stem wants to dance.”
As Anna Potter of Swallows & Damsons puts it, “A flower journal is not about perfection; it’s about presence. The smudged line where dew gathered is more truthful than any photograph.”
When you take the time to understand a flower’s habit — its natural curve, the angle of its face — your arrangements become more intuitive. A quickly dashed sketch of a branch of Viburnum opulus will remind you of its horizontal, layered structure, while a descriptive note on the transparency of a poppy petal will encourage you to place it where light can shine through. Journaling also builds a reference library of successful combinations: the dusty pink of Rosa ‘Desdemona’ against the lime green of Alchemilla mollis, a pairing you might otherwise forget.
Even if you never arrange professionally, your journal will change the way you buy flowers. You will reach past the predictable bouquet and select a single, curious stem — a scabious pod, a twist of jasmine — because you want to document its story. And in doing so, you will bring an entirely new depth of attention to your home.
The bloom you sketch today will outlast any bouquet you ever arrange.
The discipline of descriptive writing that Constance Spry demanded of her students was not a mere academic exercise but a fundamental tool for composing with flowers. Spry, who ran a celebrated flower school from her London home in the 1930s and later from Winkfield Place in Berkshire, insisted that a designer must first learn to name what they see before they can manipulate it. Her own notebooks, held in the archives of the Garden Museum in Lambeth, reveal page after page of colour notations — “the pink of a shrimp just cooked,” “the green of a Granny Smith apple” — that she used to train her eye and build a personal lexicon. This practice remains central to the curriculum at the Judith Blacklock Flower School in Knightsbridge, where students are still encouraged to keep a “colour diary” alongside their practical studies.
Spry’s method was deceptively simple: she would place a single stem before a student and ask them to describe it in twenty different ways, each more precise than the last. A tulip might begin as “red” and, after probing, become “the colour of a poppy field at dusk, with a black centre like a coal seam.” This exercise, she argued, trained the mind to see gradations that the casual observer misses. It is the same approach used by Ariella Chezar, the California-based floral designer, who asks her workshop participants at Flourish in Healdsburg to write a “sensory profile” for every flower they handle before they ever pick up a pair of snips. The habit of verbal precision translates directly into design: when you can articulate why a particular peach sits well with a particular grey, you can recreate that harmony without relying on memory alone.
For the modern journal keeper, Spry’s legacy offers a practical rubric. Dedicate a single page to one flower and list five adjectives for its colour, five for its texture, and five for its scent. Then, next to each, write a concrete reference — “the texture of a cat’s tongue,” “the scent of a damp stone wall.” Over a season, this list becomes a personal thesaurus of floral description. The Floret Farm library in Washington State, founded by Erin Benzakein, uses a similar system, cataloguing every dahlia and zinnia by a set of descriptive codes that inform their seed catalogues and arrangement recipes. You can borrow this method for your own journal, creating a shorthand that will serve you for years. Spry knew that a flower is never just a flower; it is a conversation between the eye and the world, and that conversation begins with the right word.
