Rachel Ruysch, Flowers in a Glass Vase, 1704

Went into a mini rabbit hole on flowers last night and here are a few things I gathered.

Flowers

In botany there are 4 types of plants, one of them is angiosperms (flowering plants)

There are three primary kinds of flowers: annuals, perennials, and biennials.

A fourth type behaves in annuals and perennials like a hybrid.

There are two more kinds of flowers: shrub flowers and tree flowers

I was searching for a website that has a collection of all the flowers in the world, with pictures, and this page on BioExplorer is the best one yet.

I also made a list of flower gardens across the world that I hope to visit in the future.

Flowers in Art

10 Artworks Inspired By Flowers

• Claude Monet: Series of water lily paintings capturing his garden in Giverny.
• Vincent Van Gogh: Two series of Sunflowers
• Georgia O’Keeffe: Red Canna series
• Andy Warhol: Series titled “Flowers,” based on photographs by Patricia Caulfield.
• Ambrosius Bosschaert: Still life paintings of detailed bouquets of tulips and roses from the Dutch Golden Age.
• Jeff Koons: Sculpture “Puppy” covered in bedding plants
• Rachel Ruysch: still life paintings of flowers with a high level of detail.
• Clementine Hunter: Paintings of zinnias
• William Morris: Textile designs featuring flowers, leaves, trees, or plants
• Édouard Manet: Floral still lifes, including a painting of lilacs in a crystal vase.
• Anna Atkins: Cyanotype prints of plants and flowers
• Katsushika Hokusai: Bird and flower prints (kachō-ga)

more in flower stories and art on Google Arts & Culture

quotes on flowers

If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for a moment.

– Georgia O'Keeffe

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

– Claude Monet

When I am able to paint again, if I have no imagination, I shall do some studies of flowers ... It is a great pleasure for me.

– Paul Gauguin

I think that nothing is more difficult for a true painter than to paint a rose, since before he can do so, he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

– Henri Matisse

(A) painter can say all he wants to with fruit or flowers or even clouds.

– Édouard Manet

I am working at it every morning from sunrise on, for the flowers fade so soon, and the thing is to do the whole in one rush.

– Vincent van Gogh

Never have I had more ideas about Art in my head, and yet I am forced to do flowers. While painting them—standing before the peonies and roses—I think of Michelangelo. This cannot go on.

– Henri Fantin-Latour

It relaxes my mind to paint flowers. I do not bring to it the same tension of spirit as when I am in front of a model. When I paint flowers, I arrange the tones, I try out different values boldly, without worrying about wasting a canvas.

What seems to me to be one of the most important things about our movement is that we have freed painting from the tyranny of subject-matter. I am free to paint flowers and call them flowers, without having to weave a story round them.

– Pierre-Auguste Renoir