From the pansies in a window box to the roses gifted on Valentine’s Day to the vase of chrysanthemums on a kitchen counter, flowers are so omnipresent that we may not have stopped to think much about why they’re such a big part of our lives. Not so for Christin Geall. The author and speaker has made a career out of looking at things through a botanical lens. In her new book, Flora Culture: How Flowers Shape Our World (Rizzoli, April 2026), the part-time Island resident is exploring what flowers have to teach us about such topics as aesthetics, colonialism, tokenism, and modernism.
“We are dependent upon flowers,” she writes in the introduction. “Our love of flowers and desire to be close to them has, across cultures and for millennia, created both landscapes and livelihoods. My quest to understand how we might live with them in greater harmony is the reason I wrote this new book.”
As many of us put our gardens to bed and dream of the first buds of spring, Geall offers a way to rethink this relationship that many take for granted. An edited transcript follows.
Martha’s Vineyard Magazine: What interests you about plants and flowers? Where did that interest come from?
Christin Geall: When I was younger, I was interested in ecological systems. At one point, I thought I was going to study oceanography, but that wasn’t for me. Ultimately, I ended up interested in the politics of plants. I went on to do a degree in environmental studies and anthropology, with a focus on ethnobotany.
I interned on Martha’s Vineyard in my twenties with an herbalist, Heidi Schmidt, who ran Vineyard Sound Herbs. It was just wonderful. She had studied at The Land Institute in Kansas and had a strong environmental ethic. She told stories around plants and about plants that helped me to learn about her way of thinking. Then I studied creative writing for my graduate degree because I’d always been telling stories myself through writing.
I’m interested in how people interact with plants over time and across cultures, and the different ways we either heal or feed ourselves, or what plants offered to wildlife and how they were the cornerstones of how we interact. We have plants to thank for everything.
MVM: Flora Culture is your second book about flowers, following Cultivated: The Elements of Floral Style (Princeton Architectural Press, 2020). How would you describe each book’s focus?
CG: The first book has a stronger focus on art history, and its scope ends at about the nineteenth century. There was a strong emphasis on Western art, and after it was published, I realized how Eurocentric it was. With Flora Culture, I wanted to do something different, and more global, and more inclusive, and analyze the legacies of colonialism and empire.
MVM: Why do you feel like flowers are a good lens to talk about those subjects through?
CG: We use flowers to celebrate births, deaths, and throughout our lives, so there are strong cultural associations with flowers. There is the economic side of flowers, and the horticulture and floriculture industries are massive. There are so many different directions to go in to think about how flowers shape our world.
I felt that this was an important book to write to raise questions about our relationship with flowers. In terms of food now, we shop local, celebrate regional cuisine, and understand that it’s important to buy organic. So, the future I would like to see would have us treating flowers as we do our food, in many cases. Because they’re not eaten, commercial flowers are loaded with pesticides. Just because we don’t eat them doesn’t necessarily mean we should treat them differently, because of the landscapes and livelihoods the world over that are affected by our taste. We’re all connected on this planet.
MVM: The book is composed of eighty-five short essays on such topics as the Anthropocene, cultivars, and globalization. How did you decide what topics to focus on?
CG: Well, I got cut off at a certain point – there could have been more. But writing these essays of about a thousand words, it allows the reader to move anywhere in the book. The topics were based on words that I thought needed to be added to the lexicon of gardeners and floral designers and the general public, because some words like sustainability are so slippery at this point. This idea of greenwashing exists. But, for words like globalization, people are probably thinking, “What’s that got to do with gardening?” Well, an awful lot.
You don’t have to read things in order, and I think it’s important to mention that there are over 250 images in the book, so the book itself is like a collage of ideas and images, and they interact with one another throughout.
MVM: What do you hope people learn as a result of reading your book?
CG: In terms of food, we shop local, celebrate regional cuisine, and understand that it’s important to buy organic. Those conversations are not happening with flowers enough. That’s the future I would like to see. I would like to see us treat flowers as we do our food. In many cases, they are sprayed because they’re not eaten and commercial flowers are loaded with pesticides. In fact, studies have shown that florists who don’t wear gloves while working with commercial products have residues in their bodies. Same with the farm workers.
MVM: If you could recommend people change one thing when it comes to how they think of flowers, what would it be?
CG: Say no to flower foam. There needs to be some institutional change about flower foam. It becomes microplastics in our water systems here on the Island, and it lines the bottom of water systems. It breaks down into tiny plastic particles, and it’s also toxic to produce.
When we think about memorials or putting flowers on graves, please don’t use flower foam. It has been banned in England by the Royal Horticultural Society, so the wave is out there. But that would be the one thing: ask your florist, please, not to use flower foam.
MVM: Where are your favorite places to see flowers on the Vineyard?
CG: Mermaid Farm [in Chilmark]. I lived there for a summer when I was younger, and helped Caitlin [Jones, owner and operator of the farm], before the cows, when it was just a garden.
I also really enjoy going to Polly Hill [Arboretum in West Tisbury]. And meadows, any sort of meadow environment. I’m interested in the biodiversity in meadows, but I’m also interested in the history of the landscape, and how the landscape has changed over time. Certainly, where I live in Chilmark, the pasture grasses were introduced, and so the idea of what is actually natural is not entirely natural.
But I also love visiting farms. I go to Beetlebung [Farm in Chilmark] all the time. I think it’s really exciting how many regenerative farmers the Vineyard has, and the food that people are able to produce here – it’s wonderful.
This article appears in Fall-Winter Home & Garden 2026-2027.