Flora
Featuring Caroline Bailly
Photography by Nina Choi
Words by Laura Neilson
Flowers by Caroline Bailly
Whether it's the wild blooms from her sylvan childhood in France or the magnificent arrangements she conjures for her company Buunch, a passion for flowers is a constant in Caroline Bailly’s life.
Caroline Bailly has had a professional presence in the floral industry for the last 15 years, however the ease with which she manipulates and employs the materials of her trade—whether thick bundles of vibrant stems from Manhattan’s flower market, freshly-cut globes of peonies from her own garden, or a tangle of blooms spontaneously picked from somewhere, anywhere—hints at a much deeper, more personal connection.
And indeed, that connection is almost an intrinsic one. Bailly grew up in the eastern French city of Besançon, surrounded by verdant hills and fields that practically explode with colorful blankets of sprightly flowers during the warmer months. Childhood walks through the countryside with her mother, a botanist, became foundational courses in floristics and plant identification, while the story of how her grandparents first met—knee-deep, in a local field of wildflowers—has taken on a mythical-like quality. Flora has practically spun its way into her DNA.
Buunch, her floral delivery and special-events company, is Bailly’s professional expression of this lifelong skillset, and perhaps more visibly, her own effortless pursuit of beauty through the natural world, however humble or everyday-seeming. All of it an extension of her own daily rhythms, habitudes, and love for the sensorial pleasures of her surroundings. Naturally.
One of my earliest memories of flowers is of fields filled with lavender like flowers called Saint Georges. There’s a family story of my grandfather meeting my grandmother in one of those fields, and every spring he would give her a stem.
Flower-arranging should be a joyful experience. Something that makes you happy. And it should make others happy. I think for me, that’s the best part.
I find inspiration for my work in nature—a lot. And walking in the street, looking at people, and what they’re wearing. And art, too. I’m very color and texture-oriented, I think. It’s how I usually start my design process.
The thrill of working with flowers is they’re a perishable, fragile product. Some become even more beautiful right before they’re going to die. Look at the peony; I think they’re the most beautiful the day before they lose all of their petals.
I find even the most basic flowers extraordinary because they’re a very sensual, sensory experience. You have vision, touch, fragrance…sometimes taste, too.
For me, it’s about seeing beauty at every stage of life. In Japan there’s a whole philosophy around flowers and their afterlife. And so you treat them with reverence at every stage, even when you’re taking them down.
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