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A cabinet of floral curiosities. Nothing for sale, everything for looking.

ABC Flowers and Gifts

A Cabinet of Floral Curiosities

Look-alike flowers settled side by side, blooms that only open in the dark, the secret meanings of petals and odd ideas for giving them. Nothing here is for sale. It is a place for looking closely.

Open the Cabinet

A black bat flower with long whisker-like bracteoles

What This Place Is

ABC Flowers and Gifts began as the name of a flower shop. The shop is gone; the name stayed and became a cabinet. Every drawer holds a different kind of floral curiosity, labelled as carefully as we can manage.

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A Venus flytrap in a pot, traps open
An antique metal posy holder for a tussie mussie
Pink and white water lilies floating among notched pads

The Rules of the Cabinet

Facts must be true, even when the framing is strange. Nothing is sold. Every flower gets compared, sniffed, questioned and, now and then, admired for longer than is strictly polite.

The Five Drawers

Open whichever one looks least sensible.

English lavender in bloom
Versus

Flowers that keep getting mistaken for each other, settled side by side: lotus or water lily, azalea or rhododendron.

Strange Blooms

Bat-faced flowers, petals that turn to glass in the rain, blooms that smell of chocolate.

Floriography, Odd Gifts, Made & Kept

What flowers mean, who to give them to (and who not to), and how to grow, make and keep them.

Regional Specimens

Three states, three very different floras: California poppies, Texas bluebonnets and Florida orange blossom. Or wander through the gallery.

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