I received this one from the publisher on Edelweiss in exchange of an honest review.

I was so excited about this one because I just love books about bouquets, about flowers, about plants, about gardens. And this one sounded so good. And while I did love the photographs (despite their atrocious quality) I didn’t like the text.

And let’s start with that. I tried reading the text, I tried so much. But one the font was just too tiny. Yes, I could zoom in, but then I would have to zoom out for the flowers. There isn’t much text but it was still annoying enough if you have to zoom in and out during the text parts. And the writing style just didn’t click with me, it felt like someone just grabbed a thesaurus and a dictionary and wrote a small text. Here is an example: “The floral varieties featured here exemplify these characteristics with bright colors, graceful upward-reaching petals and an insouciant bearing.” I had to look up what insouciant meant.  Or this one: “A flower’s fragrance can awaken gossamer wisps of beloved memories, tangible just on the edge of consciousness, elusive but precious.” WHUT? Just why? Or: “On another level, flowers provide a necessary visual antidote to our mostly square and rigid man-made environments.” I think you get the idea. It didn’t spark joy for me, it just felt so fake. I think it would have worked better had it been more personal and less let me grab my dictionary/thesaurus and go full out.

The photographs of the plants were bad quality (not always, but almost always), I mean, what is up in 2025/2026 and the quality of ARCs being so piss poor? Especially in books like this which are all about the photographs, you need to give me good quality. I don’t even mind if it is slightly blurry, that is fine with me, but some of these photographs felt like someone scanned them too many times. And it is just a shame.

Because the photographs deserve to be better quality, I could see that they were gorgeous, I could see how much love and care went into them. I loved seeing the various blooms, garden, places full of flowers. As a flower girlie I was in awe at the beauty of it all and I loved the colours. I also loved the variety of flowers, from well-known flowers to flowers that people may not instantly know. Plus, I love seeing close-ups. Or see arrangements of all my favourite flowers, like the Dahlia arrangement which had had me wanting to see this one for real. Or that photograph of the blossoms in Regency Park, I would love to just walk through there myself and take it all in.

I loved that it wasn’t just one garden, oh no, we are travelling the world to see various places our author/photographer has gone to. From France to USA to South America.

So despite some issues, I am very delighted I had the chance to read this book. I loved the variety of flowers, loved travelling, and I loved the bold colours! I would recommend it if you are flower person like I am~