Welcome to Eufloria where joy and flowers go together like cold lemonade and warm weather (as the song goes)!
EUFLORIA BOTANIC ART
Photographer and artist, Christina Selby started Eufloria Botanic Art to celebrate and share the joy and beauty flowers have brought into her life. The brand accomplishes this through art, education, and conservation. Eufloria’s custom collections take a creative spin on the time-honored tradition of herbaria (collecting and pressing plants for scientific understanding). Through her handmade, decorative pieces, she hopes to re-popularize a love for botany and the plants that make life possible on this Earth.
WHAT IS EUFLORIA ALL ABOUT?
ART
All my botanical art pieces are hand-made, unique, and one-of-a-kind. I make them with a lot of patience and joy. In creating these designs, I bring together my background in science and my passion for art and nature influenced by various cultures.
EDUCATION
Dive into the fascinating world of plants through my growing collection of articles.
Whether you’re into the wild and wonderful natural history stories about plants, the history and current state of botanical art, how-tos on plant collection and wildflower photography, or the latest efforts to conserve wildflowers and their habitats, the articles section of my website will have something for plant people of all interests.
COMMITMENT TO CONSERVATION
Wildflowers’ value goes beyond their pretty features. Being in the presence of natural beauty helps us connect more deeply with nature and supports our mental health. And, wildflowers are essential to ecological health. They help rebirth forests after fires, hold the soil together, provide nourishment to pollinators, produce oxygen and medicine, and generally make our world a better place.
That’s why my work supports wildflower and habitat conservation, restoration and research through vetted organizations.
For more about my conservation work visit: www.christinamselby.com
ABOUT ME
I’m Christina Selby, creator of this botanical art and education space.
I trained as an ecologist, studying the relationship between living things and their environment. My professional life has since grown like a tree with many branches. The main branches were built over the years through my work in ecological field research, environmental education, international development, science journalism, and conservation photography. And now, this sprout of a creative endeavor.
The trunk that holds this all together is my ongoing connection with nature and my desire to bring its enchantments, wonder, and beauty to others so they feel inspired to speak, care for, and act on its behalf.
For my work as a photojournalist, writer, and conservation photographer please visit: www.christinamselby.com
PROCESS
Sourcing
The plants I choose for framed custom-made herbaria are sourced from a variety of locations: plants I grow in my garden or friends’ gardens (harvested with their permission), plants responsibly harvested from the wild, or those grown on local, organic flower farms. Occasionally, I also press a plant from a bouquet gifted to me by my husband or a friend. Who can resist pressing a gorgeous pink peony, wherever it is from?
Influences
Through this work, I hope to inspire and re-popularize a love for botany as art and adventure as passionate as the Victorian age in Europe, the Joseon era in Korea, and the Edo period of Japan. In my art you’ll see influences from traditions of Oshibana (pressed flower art) and Ikebana (art of flower arrangement) of Japan as well as Rinpa painters, the Minwha painting and naturalistic style of Korea, and the natural history style of botanical art from Europe especially French, Bavaria, and Celtic cultures where my family has roots.
I interpret these traditional arts through the lens of my modern environmental consciousness and explore the ideas of luxury as simplicity, metaphors of the material as spiritual, and the play of permanence and ephemerality.
Technique
To get lasting color and longevity, I use the same detailed technique to press plants as museum and university herbaria around the world. I turn science into art through my selection and placement of plants on handmade deckled-edge watercolor papers that serve as my herbarium sheets. My work is with an eye to aesthetics, design, and decoration. Rather than putting it on a dark shelf for important and future scientific uses (I’ve got my own personal collection for that), these pressed plants are meant to be exhibited, viewed, and shared. My hope is to spark a connection over a shared love of plants and give us the energy we need to conserve these most essential building blocks of life on this planet.
Is this work nostaligic? Yes. Hopelessly romantic? Absolutely. Meaningful, rooted, and important as the plants themselves? You bet. My hope is that a bit of my love for plants gets transferred to you through this work.