Botanicals by Sandy
A Cartersville, Georgia studio where self-taught artist Sandy Whitaker has pressed flowers and ferns from her own garden for more than twenty years, full-time since 2011. Southern Crafted carries her original pressings.
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Eight hundred dollars for a pressed flower
Sandy Whitaker is a self-taught artist in Cartersville, Georgia who has been pressing flowers and ferns for more than twenty years. She had raised four children, and when they left home she went looking for something of her own. On a trip to Chattanooga for her husband’s fiftieth birthday she found pressed botanicals in a shop priced at eight hundred dollars apiece, wanted ten of them, and decided to make her own instead. She turned it into full-time work in 2011.
She grows most of what she presses
Most of what goes into a piece comes out of her own backyard — hydrangea, fern, dogwood — grown, cut and pressed by hand, then arranged one stem at a time. “I paint with nature,” is how she puts it. The blue hydrangeas are what people come back for; they are the ones that remind her of her grandmother’s house.
The pressing, not a picture of it
Her own shop sells reproductions — printed and framed by partners in Atlanta. They are lovely, and they are not the same thing. What we carry is the pressing itself: the actual hydrangea, cut and dried and laid down by hand, then mounted and signed. One of one, because the plant was cut once.
Sandy Whitaker
Sandy Whitaker has pressed flowers and ferns in Cartersville, Georgia for more than twenty years, and made it her full-time work in 2011 — most of what she presses grown in her own backyard, the rest gathered from roadsides and woods. She arranges them by eye and hand-letters the botanical name in the corner of each finished piece. “I try to picture them as they are in nature,” she says, “and let the flowers speak for themselves.”
Flower put her in a 2025 feature on herbaria — the tradition that runs back through Linnaeus and Darwin — alongside Marian McEvoy and Tricia Paoluccio. James Farmer has used her pressings in two of his books, and a pair of her hydrangeas hung in a kitchen Erin Napier designed on Home Town back in 2017.
Almost everything her own shop sells is a reproduction, printed and framed by partners in Atlanta. What we carry is the pressing itself.
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