Issha Marie

The Accidental Florist

Those who know me intimately can hardly imagine that there was once a time when flowers never really elicited much of a response from me. I found them pretty enough, sure, but I would never pay close enough attention to them. This is hardly the case now; flowers and foliage dictate much of my creative and meditative practices. I feel like I think and speak in two languages: food and flowers. I squeal with excitement when I see a patch of wild foliage ripe for foraging. When I drive by interesting neighbourhoods with wild vines, foreign-looking trees or shrubbery, or overgrown flowering plants spilling over sidewalks, I try my best to memorize their locations so I can go back to these places to take photographs of the plants. I love visiting botanical conservatories. I will stop in the middle of the street with my heavy bags of groceries to take iPhone photographs of crawling clematis vines, camellia blooms scattered on the ground, or... say... persimmon trees with their unripe fruit. There was such a tree near my old apartment in Riley Park, and I would visit that tree everyday to observe the fruit go from green to bright orange. I was always too shy to ask the caretaker of that yard if I could snip off one branch to use for floral arrangements, so I would take multiple iPhone photos of it instead.