Flowers Kept Finding Me: How a Motif Shaped My Creative Practice

For a long time, I didn’t think flowers were central to my work.

They appeared here and there, in bag charms, textile products, drawings, travel journals, installations, and paintings. I treated each appearance as part of a different project, belonging to a different version of myself. There was the designer. The artisan entrepreneur. The gardener. The traveler. The painter. The student of yoga and philosophy.

Only recently, through a more deliberate contemplation of my creative practice, have I begun to see that these were never separate paths. Running quietly through all of them was a single recurring motif: the flower.

Looking back, I can see that the flower has been accompanying me for almost a decade.

The story began quite practically.

At Pure Ghee Designs, we were left with fabric scraps from the production of our bags. Around the same time, a few women from the surrounding community approached us looking for work. Instead of discarding the leftover textiles, we began experimenting with ways to transform them. Together, we started making simple fabric flowers.

Those flowers became charms for our bags.

At the time, I did not think of them as art or as a defining motif. They were simply a way to create beauty from waste while generating meaningful work for women artisans. Yet, in hindsight, this was the first appearance of a form that would continue to return to me in unexpected ways.

In 2018, I travelled to Japan and participated in a traditional fabric flower-making workshop. I was fascinated by the intricate flowers that were historically used as hair ornaments. More importantly, I saw how these flowers were being reimagined in contemporary ways while remaining rooted in tradition.

Something clicked.

When I returned to India, I began exploring the possibility of creating flowers inspired by forms closer to home. This led to one of our most beloved creations: the mogra, or jasmine flower.

That moment changed the trajectory of my relationship with flowers.

As our women’s team grew, so did the possibilities. We needed to create more work, which meant inventing new applications for the flowers we were making. The flower motif expanded beyond bag charms into hair accessories, garlands, home accents, curtain ties, torans, installations, and decorative objects. We played with scale, making flowers tiny enough to fit in the palm of a hand and large enough to transform a space.

The flower became a language through which we could keep experimenting.

At the same time, another relationship with flowers was unfolding.

I had started drawing regularly, often turning to plants because they felt unintimidating. They were generous subjects. They stayed still. They invited observation.

Over time, I found myself increasingly drawn to flowers. I undertook a hundred-day drawing challenge focused on flowers from my surroundings, many of them growing in my own terrace garden. Drawing required a different kind of attention than making. It asked me to observe rather than construct.

As I drew petals, stems, colours, textures, and stages of growth, flowers became less of a decorative motif and more of a subject of inquiry.

Travel continued to deepen this inquiry.

Visits to Thailand in 2018 and again in 2022 introduced me to the extraordinary world of floral culture in Southeast Asia. At the Museum of Floral Culture and in everyday encounters, I became aware of how deeply flowers are woven into social, spiritual, and ceremonial life.

Flowers were not simply decorative objects. They were offerings, symbols, gestures of hospitality, acts of devotion, markers of celebration, and carriers of cultural memory.

I began to appreciate flowers not only as forms, but as vessels of meaning.

Each encounter seemed unrelated at the time. Textile flowers. Jasmine garlands. Botanical drawings. Terrace gardens. Japanese craft traditions. Thai floral culture.

Yet the flower kept returning.

Last year, during a Yoga Sutra immersion, the motif revealed itself in an entirely new way.

Flowers became a metaphor for blooming, for coming into one’s own, for the briefness of beauty, and for the inevitability of decay. The life cycle of a flower mirrored the life cycle of all things: emergence, flourishing, fading, and return.

For perhaps the first time, I stopped relating to the flower as something outside myself.

I began to imagine myself as the flower.

The inquiry shifted from making flowers to becoming one.

That may sound poetic, but it was a profound change in perspective. The flower was no longer merely an object of craft, observation, or representation. It became a way of understanding growth, impermanence, vulnerability, and transformation.

Looking back now, I realize that this essay is not really about flowers.

It is about integration.

For years, I held different parts of my identity in separate compartments. Design belonged in one place. Art belonged in another. Gardening, travel, craft, philosophy, and community work occupied their own spaces.

The flower helped me see that these divisions were largely artificial.

The same curiosity was moving through all of them.

The same questions were being asked in different forms.

The same practice was expressing itself through different mediums.

The flower became the thread that stitched these fragments together.

I still don’t fully understand why flowers continue to call me back. Perhaps I never will. What I do know is that they have accompanied me through making, observing, learning, traveling, drawing, teaching, gardening, and contemplation.

And perhaps that is enough.

This reflection is not an explanation of a motif as much as an acknowledgement of a relationship that has been unfolding quietly in the background of my life and work.

A relationship I am only now beginning to recognize.