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30 October, 6:00 PM

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The Short List

Sandy Whitaker

Sandy Whitaker has pressed flowers and ferns from her own Cartersville, Georgia garden for more than twenty years, full-time since 2011. Her prints hang in a good many houses. These nine pieces are the pressings themselves.

Edition0 pieces, no two alike

MadePressed flowers and ferns, many grown in her own garden

ShippingPacked by hand and shipped insured

Botanicals by Sandy — The Short List

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Where it started

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.

The garden

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.

What we have

Nine on black

Nearly everything Sandy makes is mounted on pale parchment. These nine are on black, and the reason is obvious the moment you see the hydrangea against it. Her own shop sells reproductions, printed and framed by partners in Atlanta; what arrives here is the actual pressed hydrangea, the actual dogwood, a white orchid. Nine pieces, and then the series is finished.

Practical

Before it ships

Is this an original or a print?

An original. Sandy presses the plants herself, and each of these is the actual pressing — not a scan of one. Her own shop sells reproductions; these are the pieces those reproductions are made from.

How are these different from Sandy's other pressings?

Her standard work is pressed on pale parchment, and we carry those too. These nine are mounted on black — the exception rather than the rule, and the contrast is the whole point of them.

How will it arrive?

Packed by hand between rigid board and shipped insured. If it arrives damaged, send us a photograph and we'll make it right.

Will the colors fade?

Pressed botanicals are organic material and they will shift over years, the way a watercolor does. Keep the piece out of direct sun and it will hold its color for a long time.

What if it sells before I decide?

Then it's gone. Nine is what we were able to get, and when the series sells there isn't another — these aren't pieces she makes to order.

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Two releases a month through the holidays, then one a month. No code, nothing marked down; that isn’t what it’s for.

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