How Nature, Memory, and Flowers Shape My Creative Life
Spring is always a welcome time. A time of growth and renewal. I love how the vibrant colors seem to wash away the gray and the weight of winter. Everything starts blooming again, even the things you thought wouldn’t come back.
Nature has always been inspiring to me — the beauty in a leaf’s veins, the way things bloom in their own time, the way color shifts in different light. There’s something magical about it. It's not loud or demanding — it just is. Unfolding, growing, reaching. I see a lot of that in my own creative process.
My mom loved the flower Sweet Williams. Every spring, my dad would pick them for her — something he started when they were dating. My grandmothers loved flowers too. My Maw Maw used to go walking and pick wildflowers, holding them gently in a damp paper towel she carried as she walked. I can still picture her with her straw hat and quiet determination to keep going, even after my Paw Paw passed. She always kept moving.
I was lucky to grow up in the country, just down the road from my dad’s parents. He was the youngest in a big family, and since his parents were older by the time he came along, he often said they felt more like grandparents in spirit — gentle, wise, and steady. That part of my childhood feels like such a blessing. The woods, the fields, the streams and the rivers — they were always there. Wildflowers growing along the road. Honeysuckle in the air. Blackberry bushes in bloom. It was a kind of richness I didn’t realize I had at the time.
Now I live in the suburbs, and it’s different. Construction, new roads, houses popping up. I miss the quiet. I miss my Maw Maw’s four o’clocks blooming all around the edges of her house — beauty that couldn’t be stopped. I miss the rose bush my mom planted at the edge of our house, the one that kept growing back even after it was cut down. And I think about the pine tree we planted one Christmas, the one that died after she did. Some kind of disease took over. It didn’t survive, but somehow that rose bush always did.
Sometimes I go back to Tennessee and I still see pieces of that world. But so much has changed. Only a few family members still live on the land I once ran through. I didn’t know then what a gift it was — the openness, the quiet sky at night, the stars so bright it felt like the universe was looking back at me. I used to sit out on the deck with our cats on my lap, just staring up. I’ve always been drawn to the unknown — the what-ifs, the dreamscapes, the places beyond.
A lot of my dreams still take place in those spaces. Unmapped places. Untouched beauty. And sometimes, those feelings — that awe and longing — show up in my art. Even now, my daughter brings me flowers. Tiny ones from the playground or the sidelines of soccer practice. And when she hands them to me, it brings everything full circle.
It’s not always the planned inspiration that moves me. Sometimes it’s the unexpected — the wildflowers, the memories, the colors that won’t stop blooming no matter what tries to get in their way.
Inspiration doesn’t always show up with a plan. Sometimes it’s a flower your daughter hands you without saying a word. Sometimes it’s the smell of honeysuckle that carries a memory you didn’t know you needed. These small, quiet things — they make their way into my work. Not always literally, but in the feeling. And I think that’s enough.
1 comment
Emily,
A beautifully written essay on spring and the beauty of the awakening of flowers and joy.