Casting Flowers: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Beautiful Botanical Art

An introduction by Rachel Dein to botanical bas-relief, an innovative technique where flowers and plants are cast in plaster, capturing the beauty of every season.

Casting Flowers offers an exciting new way to record in fine detail the texture, pattern, and delicacy of plants, with step-by-step instructions for projects as small as a single stem or as complex as a field of wildflowers.

Makers at every level will be inspired to explore natural spaces and work with accessible materials, charting the progression of the seasons. Like a fossil of long-forgotten flowers, each finished cast becomes a vestige of time and an act of remembering: a summer day in the garden, a perfect magnolia at its peak, a wedding bouquet to last forever, or a memory of the first daffodils in spring.

“Rachel Dein has distilled the flowers’ essence into her tiles, each one the memory of nature itself.”
–Ngoc Minh Ngo, author of ‘Roses in the Garden’

“‘Casting Flowers’ tells the story of a fleeting moment of glory before each plant depicted has faded - their texture, pattern, and delicacy rendered rich in the plaster casting.”
–Sorrel Everton, Gardens Illustrated

“A dazzling form of preservative art in which transient beauty is held for years to come at its moment of perfection. What Dein makes is that miraculous thing: the everlasting gardem.”
–Sarah Raven, author of ‘A Year Full of Pots’