Garden State - Harper's BAZAAR October 2021
In a stunning new book, a florist and a photographer put an unconventional spin on the traditional floral bouquet, proving a rose’s bloom may be fleeting, but its allure is perennial
In the tiny town of Whanganui, on the south-eastcoast of New Zealand’s North Island, is a field of roses. There are seemingly millions of them (the actual count is closer to 40,000) in various stages of blooming and budding in red, yellow, pink, white. This isn’t by chance but by design; the rose bushes having been cultivated for three generations by the Matthews family, who turned a sprawling farming property into one of the world’s most extensive collections of garden roses.
It was here that New Zealand-born, Sydney-based photographer Derek Henderson and Australian-born, London-based florist Simone Gooch (founder of Fjura) came to collaborate on a feature for the British magazine Pleasure Garden in 2018. They fell so in love with the place that they returned on their own to extend the project. The result is the book Rosa (named for a variety of international rose the Matthews family has been importing since the 1960s), showcasing Gooch’s stunning floral sculptures captured through Henderson’s lens.
“We arrived there not knowing what we were getting into, and just saw all these roses — literally acres of rose bushes,” Henderson recalls, still in awe at that first impression. “It was amazing. It was like …” He pauses, unable to grasp a word vast enough to capture the experience. “It was a bit hard to take in.”
The project was a gamble — roses only flower at a certain time, and Gooch had to fly in from London, so it needed to be perfect. The pair arrived in December, just in time for the first bloom of the season. They spent a week picking roses in the lingering light and the cool of the evenings, putting them in storage and then rising early to transport them to an old hall with beautiful natural light a few minutes down the road. Gooch and her assistant would create the enormous rose structures, and Henderson would shoot them on his large-format camera using colour-negative film. Gooch would start on the next arrangement, and in this way, they made seven or eight pieces a day. “The arrangement of the roses was very much freestyle,” Gooch says. In a sense, she let the roses dictate the shape of the sculpture. Instead of coming to a bunch with a predetermined design, she arranged them by “considering each stem of the rose and their colours”.
“Simone has a very unique way of seeing things and arranging flowers,” Henderson says. “Historically and in the art world, roses have been admired for so long. You can look at one of her arrangements and see whatever you want to see: roses are loaded with metaphors and meaning.”
A rose bush can live longer than a human, but the arrangements only existed at that moment; once Henderson and Gooch were finished with an arrangement, the roses were taken back to the farm to be used as compost. “That’s the thing about roses; they’re very ephemeral; they don’t last,” Henderson says. “It’s a fleeting kind of beauty — it was about capturing the roses at their best, but it’s also quite beautiful to catch a rose when it’s at the end of its bloom and a bit faded. They don’t last, but the photographs will.”
Cath Matthews, who runs the property with her husband, Bob, and their children, Samantha and Thomas, says that hosting Henderson and Gooch on their rose farm reignited the family’s appreciation for the flower. “Of all the things I’ve seen done with roses, this would be the most beautiful, amazing and thought-provoking,” she says. “Roses are something we take for granted because we see so many in the nursery, so to see them transformed into a unique artform highlighted the endless possibilities of roses.”
This story originally appeared in the October 2021 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR. Photographed by Derek Henderson. Floral arrangements by Simone Gooch.
