For botanical preservation artist Kendall Buie, there’s a story in every flower petal. She preserves and makes art from flowers, bringing the splendors of nature indoors for clients who want to live a little longer with flowers from home gardens at their zenith, preserving them through the gloom of fall or winter. Other times, her clients want to hold onto sentimental moments like weddings or baby showers. Her work preserves the flowers, ensuring the moments they represent get to live on.
Her work is like perfect-perfect flower bouquets—striking the balance between stunning focal flowers and filler material—but trapped forever on paper. These flowers are pressed flat to show their ephemeral beauty and curvy silhouettes.
But she also dries some flowers in silica to maintain their three-dimensional quality. Recently she has even started experimenting with more sculptural pieces and new textures, like layering pressed flowers with textiles and tulle veiling. For Buie, a flower preserved any way is just as sweet.
When working with Buie, clients often collaborate closely on color palettes, or they work with her to select focal blooms and foliage that work cohesively. But each piece also complements a client’s home. “Every piece I make is deeply intentional about how it mirrors its environment,” Buie explains. The flowers don’t just harmonize with each other, they pair well with a client’s architectural tones and textures of their specific space, she says.
To make her unique art, Buie largely gets flowers from local gardeners or forages for them. Come fall and winter, Buie will be knee deep in brambles out in the woods, collecting “skeleton leaves,” leaves that have become translucent, delicate networks of lacy veins after morning frost has eaten away their soft tissues. “But each plant tells a story,” she says. “And each piece helps viewers see nature differently. Even a weed presses beautifully. My work, when placed in indirect light, has a living quality when they catch the rays and subtly shift throughout the day.”
Buie also loves that her work is sustainable and reduces the floral industry’s environmental footprint. Aside from foraging or gathering day-olds from florists, she gathers flowers from weddings or funerals the day after (when the events donate the flowers), ensuring that what would otherwise be tons of organic flower waste winding up in landfills gets second life as art.
Looking ahead to the future, Buie will be hosting botanical workshops and is excited to expand into custom installations for design-forward commercial spaces. “I would love to see these archival pieces in places where large-scale botanical installations can truly set the vibe,” she says.
See more at https://www.kendallbuie.com/
