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Southern Bouquets

Southern Bouquets by Melissa Bigner with Heather Barrie and photography by Peter Frank Edwards demonstrates how to bring the beauty of flowers home, no matter your zip code or the state of your green thumb.
The book highlights individual flowers that are quintessential to the Southern blooms (though many appear throughout the country) and shows how to create simple yet elegant bouquets with homegrown fare from backyard gardens and local flower farms.
The bouquets that grace the dining rooms and parlors of stately Southern homes are beautiful and elegant, but they need not be complicated or expensive. Bigner and Barrie celebrate favorite home-grown flowers in unique bouquets. Filled with breathtaking photos, Southern Bouquets gives readers a guided tour of the South's classic flowers, and provides human interest stories for each of the profiled flowers.
Also, get tips on:
Arranging bouquets
Growing conditions
Blooming time
Vaselife

Melissa Bigner is a senior editor at Charleston Home. She has worked for Southern Living and Southern Accents, Better Homes & Gardens Decorating, Coastal Living, Home, Cottage Living, and Charleston Magazine. She has also authored books for Better Homes & Gardens, HGTV, and TLC. She produces and edits Charleston Weddings, a biannual magazine, and lives in Charleston. www.melissabigner.com
Heather Barrie, owner of Charleston, South Carolina's Gathering Floral+Event Design, is in demand year-round. Her work has appeared in Charleston Weddings, Elegant Bride, Inside Weddings, Modern Bride, and Wedding Style magazines. www.gatheringevents.com
(20100401)

After our beach trip and returning to my third grade classroom, my husband sent me a beautiful bouquet to celebrate my September 1st birthday.

Digital bouquet of wildflowers spotted ont the Knob Top Trail at Bernheim Forest, Clermont, KY USA

Suzy Bales sums up garden arrangements like this: "Life is best lived in sync with the seasons." She brings a new angle to four-season garden bouquets—gather the blooms, but don’t overlook the leaves, branches, and vines you find in the off-season. Her fresh-from-the-garden arrangements celebrate the ever-changing landscape and feature unique combinations of flowers and foliage for floral creations in every style.
Lifelong gardener and lifestyle writer Bales also takes on the role as inspirational designer to educate gardeners about the latest research on conditioning individual garden flowers, how to care for them immediately after cutting, and the length of time they can be expected to last. No other book has compiled such complete instructions for prolonging the bloom.