Approaching All Hallow’s Eve/Halloween, Samhain, and Day of the Dead, we are entering into the season of gratitude - running from now through the Winter Solstice & the calendar’s new year.

It is a season of gathering, collection, and reflection, and Cultivating Place is in conversation this week with an artist and a green spirit in our garden care world, Louesa Roebuck, about her newest book Punk Ikebana: Reimagining the Art of Floral Design (gathering, gleaning & composing in situ), being published by Cameron + Company Books on November 8.

Louesa is a multimedia and multigenre creative, floral artist, printmaker, painter, textile designer, curator, and author. You may recall our conversation several years ago around her first book: Foraged Flora.

In Punk Ikebana, Louesa starts from a place of reverence for tradtion, in particular those of Japan, but also from a place of "peace-punk, Do-No-Harm." Ikebana, “the way of the flowers,” has been studied formally in Japan and beyond for centuries. In Punk Ikebana, Louesa explains and riffs on the art form’s classic rules—and then demonstrates how to seasonally, sensually, and meaningfully bend them. The book highlights stunning arrangements and installations that unite the cultural meanings and wise elegance of a traditional perspective with an inviting freedom from convention for anyone to feel welcome into.