The Practice, Not the Product
Flower journaling is not about creating a flawless botanical illustration. It is a contemplative habit, a weekly or daily ritual of recording what blooms around you — through pressing, sketching, colour notes, or simply a few lines of observation. The practice sits at the intersection of nature study, mindfulness, and slow creativity. Unlike a traditional scrapbook, a flower journal privileges process over presentation. Pages may be smudged with pollen, petals imperfectly flattened, handwriting wobbly. That is the point.
Leading florists have quietly adopted the practice as a counterweight to the fast pace of event work. Amy Merrick, the Brooklyn-based floral designer and author, often speaks of her own notebooks filled with ink drawings and pressed specimens from her garden in Connecticut. She describes journaling as “a way to learn a flower’s personality — how it droops, how its colour shifts at day’s end.” Similarly, Hattie Fox, founder of That Flower Shop in London, keeps a seasonal log of every stem that passes through her Shoreditch studio, a habit that now informs her planting lists and colour palettes for weddings.
Choosing Your Tools: Paper, Presses, and Pigments
A flower journal demands materials that can handle moisture, plant dyes, and the pressure of pressing. Start with a sketchbook that has heavyweight paper — Moleskine’s Art Collection sketchbook (£18.99) is a reliable choice, as is the Seawhite of Brighton A5 watercolour journal (£12.50), beloved by art students for its 300gsm cold-pressed surface. Avoid spiral binding if you plan to press flowers directly into the pages; the bulk can warp the coil. A casebound book with an elastic closure allows the journal to expand and still lie reasonably flat when weighted.
For pressing, a traditional flower press — two boards of birch plywood with bolts and wingnuts, lined with blotting paper and corrugated cardboard — remains the gold standard. Hawthorn Press, a small UK maker, crafts presses from reclaimed oak (£45). If you prefer a portable method, The Completist in Peckham sells a minimalist A5 pressing kit (£28) that slips into a tote bag, perfect for gathering specimens on a walk through Columbia Road Flower Market or a visit to Great Dixter’s meadows.
When it comes to adding colour notes, watercolour pencils and a travel brush pen outpace a full palette. Faber-Castell’s Albrecht Dürer watercolour pencils (£3.20 each) offer rich pigment that activates with a damp brush. For ink, a waterproof fine liner like the Sakura Pigma Micron 05 (£2.65) prevents bleeding when you later wash over a sketch. Keep a small set of Washi tapes — the translucent kind from mt masking tape in Tokyo — to fix delicate stems without glue.
The flower journal is not a herbarium; it is a conversation with a fleeting season. A pressed petal holds not just a memory but the light of the afternoon you picked it.
The Summer Palette: What to Collect and Document Right Now
Summer offers an almost overwhelming abundance. To avoid decision paralysis, focus your journal on a single thread each month. In June, track the arrival of Rosa ‘Munstead Wood’ or the frothy umbels of Orlaya grandiflora — both available at cutting gardens like Angel Flowers in Suffolk. July is the month of scented pelargoniums and dusky scabious; collect a leaf and a bloom side by side to capture the contrast in texture. By August, the dahlias dominate, and the journal becomes a study in form: the ball-shaped ‘Cornel Bronze’ next to a spidery ‘Honka’ from Sarah Raven’s Perch Hill.
What to record beyond the specimen itself? Note the date, location, and weather conditions in the margins. If you are journaling in a garden, log the pollinators you observe — a buff-tailed bumblebee buried in a foxglove, a hummingbird hawk-moth at dusk. Many practitioners assign a simple colour swatch: dab a wet brush on a petal and paint a small square of its exact hue. Over weeks, your journal builds a personal colour index, more nuanced than any Pantone fan.
Flower markets provide urban foragers with a different kind of summer catalogue. At Marché aux Fleurs Reine Elizabeth II in Paris, you can document the tightly furled parrot tulips that linger into early summer, or the armfuls of lavender sold in burlap sacks. At Bloemenmarkt in Amsterdam, the peonies give way to giant alliums and sunflowers, each stem an invitation to a journal entry.
Beyond Pressing: Sketching, Writing, and Mixed-Media Approaches
A flower journal deepens when you combine pressed specimens with other forms of documentation. Blind contour drawing — where your eye traces the edge of a petal while your pen moves without looking at the page — yields surprisingly expressive lines and teaches you to see a flower’s true shape, not the symbol of it. Set a timer for three minutes and draw the same bloom from three angles. Glue the best attempt next to the pressed flower, and you have a dialogue between observation and preservation.
Writing exercises can unlock the sensory dimensions that a photograph misses. Try this prompt: “Describe the scent as if to someone who has lost their sense of smell.” A Jasminum grandiflorum blossom might be “a twilight cloud that slips into the back of the throat, sweet and slightly animal.” A tomato leaf, often added to summer posies for its sharp green note, is “a garden’s earthy exhalation, like rain on hot pavement.” Record these fragments directly onto the journal page using a soft graphite pencil or a fountain pen inked with sepia — the colour of time passing.
For those drawn to a more tactile layer, incorporate cyanotype printing. This Victorian photographic process uses iron salts and sunlight to create a Prussian blue negative of a plant’s silhouette. Jacquard’s Cyanotype Sensitizer Set (£22) works on paper and fabric. Coat a page, arrange fresh fern fronds or cow parsley on top, expose to summer sun for ten minutes, and rinse. The ghostly blue print becomes a striking backdrop for a pressed specimen or a handwritten note. Artists at Kew Gardens’ Shirley Sherwood Gallery have used the technique in residency, and the results are often exhibited alongside botanical watercolours.
Where to Learn: Workshops, Gardens, and Inspiration
A handful of workshops worldwide now explicitly teach flower journaling as a creative practice, blending botany, art, and mindfulness. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew runs a seasonal “Botanical Sketchbook” course (£65) that includes a guided walk to collect specimens, followed by a session on watercolour and annotation. Their tutor, Rachel Pedder-Smith, an award-winning botanical illustrator, emphasizes that a journal is “a space for failure and discovery” — much of her own work starts as rough field notes before becoming a large-scale herbarium painting.
In Melbourne, Cecilia Fox occasionally hosts “Pressed Flower Journals” evenings in their Collingwood studio, pairing a floristry demonstration with a session on composing pages using locally grown natives like banksia and eucalyptus. In New York, Flock Finger Lakes (a design studio and cutting garden founded by Molly Culver) offers a summer retreat where participants harvest their own flowers and create a hand-bound journal to fill during the stay. Their approach is deeply seasonal: a July workshop might centre entirely on the fleeting window of sweet peas, with every page recording a different cultivar and its scent.
Even without a formal class, you can draw inspiration from artists who have made the flower journal a central part of their practice. Catherine Latson, a Maine-based artist, keeps what she calls a “petal diary” — small envelopes of dried blooms stitched into fabric pages, accompanied by haiku. Her work is collected by the Smithsonian. The late Derek Jarman’s garden journals from Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, published as Derek Jarman’s Garden, are a masterclass in observing tough, salt-worn plants with tenderness and precision. His entries — a sea kale leaf glued next to a stone, a poppy sketched in ballpoint — prove that the humblest materials yield the most intimate records.
A pressed flower is a time machine. Open a notebook from three summers ago, and the pale ghost of a love-in-a-mist will bring back the sound of bees, the heat on your arms, the exact shade of blue that year.
The Living Archive: Binding, Storing, and Sharing Your Work
A flower journal is meant to be handled, but a few techniques will keep its contents from crumbling. Pressed flowers are fragile; protect them with a sheet of glassine paper (archival, acid-free) interleaved between pages, or by mounting the specimen on a separate piece of cardstock that can be slipped into a clear sleeve. Lineco sells self-adhesive linen hinging tissue (£7.50 for a pack of 24) that allows you to attach a pressed flower without glue touching the petals. Store completed journals upright, like books, away from direct light and damp. A cedar-lined box from The English Stamp Company works well for long-term preservation.
As your collection grows, consider binding loose pages into a single volume. London Centre for Book Arts offers a weekend course in Japanese stab binding (£110), a technique that lies perfectly flat and accommodates thick, layered pages. Using a cover of handmade paper from Shepherds Bookbinders in Victoria, you can create a set of matching journals, one for each season. Some practitioners number their journals and keep a running index of the flowers inside — by common name and Latin binomial — making the archive a genuine reference for garden planning.
Sharing a flower journal can feel vulnerable, but it often sparks connection. A journal left open on a coffee table invites conversation; a page photographed and posted to Instagram with the hashtag #flowerjournal becomes part of a quiet global community. Florists like Zita Elze in London sometimes borrow from their own journals to design a bespoke wedding bouquet, showing clients a pressed clematis from a specific week in June and translating that into fresh stems. In this way, the personal archive becomes a living tool, a bridge between memory and new creation.
What begins as a solitary summer afternoon with a daisy and a notebook can, over time, accumulate into a body of work that is unsellable, uncurated, and utterly yours. The flower journal asks nothing but your attention, and in return it offers a record of the world’s most beautiful, temporary things. In a culture that digitises every experience, the act of putting petals to paper is a small, radical act — a refusal to let the season pass unseen.
Your garden forgets nothing. Perhaps your journal should not either.
One of the most transformative, yet often overlooked, techniques within the flower journaling practice is the colour mapping exercise. This is not a simple watercolour wash, but a systematic method of capturing the exact tonal shifts of a single blossom over time. It requires no artistic skill whatsoever—only a small set of gouache paints, a fine brush, and patience. The florist Monica Maunsell, founder of Mona & Co. in Copenhagen, uses this method obsessively in her own notebooks to develop the nuanced colour palettes for which her studio is known, particularly in their autumn arrangements that pivot on faded greens and bruised purples.
The process is simple and precise. Pick a single flower—say, a fading Hydrangea macrophylla—and over the course of a week, each day mix a dab of paint that exactly matches the current colour of one specific petal. Paint a small square, a circle, or a wash, and label it with the date and a note about the light. A hydrangea that begins as a vibrant cornflower blue will, by day five, have shifted through a muddy violet to a faded grey-green, the edges turning the colour of old parchment. Sarah Raven, in her gardening newsletters from Perch Hill, has referenced noting how the deep maroon of Dahlia ‘Bishop of Llandaff’ bleaches to a rusty bronze under a full week of direct July sun. This data, when collected over several seasons, becomes a personal almanac of spectral change.
This exercise yields immediate, practical benefits for any floral enthusiast. For flower arrangers, it builds a living reference library of colour combinations that are impossible to find in a catalog. A pressing of a pale blush peony next to a colour map of its deep cerise throat might inspire a bridal bouquet for the following spring. For gardeners, it offers a record of how a plant performs in a specific spot—whether a rose that was described as “crimson” in the nursery catalog actually becomes a hot pink in your clay soil. The RHS Garden Wisley has a dedicated colour garden using a similar principle, mapping tonal harmonies alongside plant compatibilities for public education. Your journal becomes a personal version of their systematic trial, tailored to your own windowsill or border.
The material for this is modest. A set of primary gouache colours from Winsor & Newton (£8.95 for a set of six 5ml tubes) mixed on an old ceramic tile gives you complete control, as gouache dries quickly and matte, allowing for accurate layering without shine. Use a size 2 round brush from Daler-Rowney (£3.50) for precise squares. The act of mixing—patiently adding a dot of white or a speck of burnt sienna—sharpens the eye more than any formal art lesson. Over a season, the journal pages become a silent visual score of a garden’s most subtle drama: the conversation between a petal and the fading afternoon light.
