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Opens October 31 at 6:00 PM  ·  Sandy Whitaker

Pressed Botanical Orchid on Black

Sale price$695.00

The curve is the composition

Three phalaenopsis blooms on a single curved stem, and the curve is the composition. On black the veining in the petals shows, which is the part you never notice on a windowsill. Not a print of it — the stem Sandy pressed, lettered by hand.

Pressed Orchid on Black Background
Pressed Botanical Orchid on Black Sale price$695.00
Sandy Whitaker holding an armload of fresh blue hydrangeas cut for pressing

Gathered from her garden

Most of what Sandy presses comes out of her own backyard in Cartersville — hydrangea, fern, dogwood — cut when it is right and pressed the same day. The rest she gathers from roadsides and woods.

Sandy Whitaker arranging pressed hydrangea blossoms and leaves by hand on backing boards in her Cartersville, Georgia studio

Arranged by eye, one stem at a time

Nothing is laid out to a template. Sandy works each piece by hand, then letters the botanical name into the corner when it is finished. “I try to picture them as they are in nature,” she says, “and let the flowers speak for themselves.”

Framed pressed botanicals by Sandy Whitaker hung above a console table in a Southern dining room

They gather well

One is enough to settle a wall. Several, hung close, become something else — a grid above a console, or a run up a staircase, which is what James Farmer did with her pressings in Home Again. These frames are 19½ × 12.

Sandy Whitaker of Botanicals by Sandy in front of a wall of her framed pressed botanicals

The maker

Botanicals by Sandy

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 comes out of her own backyard; the rest she gathers from roadsides and woods. She arranges each piece by eye and letters the botanical name in the corner by hand.

Flower put her in a 2025 feature on herbaria — the tradition that runs back through Linnaeus and Darwin. 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 in 2017.

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