INSIDE AND OUTSIDE: Nature + Pop Culture News with Jessica Murnane · Jessica Murnane

Using Nature For Art Therapy + How To Press Flowers with Karen Azoulay (Author of Flowers and Their Meanings)

·48 min·3 clips

Karen pressed flowers for a year during a dark time and turned them into a bound record of her life.

1. INSIDE AND OUTSIDE: Nature + Pop Culture News with Jessica Murnane focuses on flowers, pressed flowers, and floral symbolism with Karen Azoulay. 2. Jessica Murnane is the host, and Karen Azoulay is the guest as a Canadian-born, Brooklyn-based artist and author of Flowers and Their Meanings. 3. The episode asks how flowers carry memory, ritual, art, and meaning when people use them as keepsakes or symbols. 4. Karen describes growing up in suburban Toronto and noticing lawns covered in dandelions, especially the places where pesticides were not used. 5. She connects dandelions to the sun, the moon, and the stars, and to the Victorian phrase 'rustic oracle.' 6. Jessica contrasts dandelions with flowers such as peonies, cosmos, and zinnias, and asks why dandelions were labeled weeds. 7. Karen explains that dandelions were brought to the Americas on the Mayflower for medicinal use and as a salad green. 8. She says chrysanthemum carries different meanings across cultures, including endurance in Chinese symbolism and former status as an expensive flower in Western culture. 9. Karen and Jessica compare short bedding marigolds from big-box stores with African marigolds that can grow to four feet tall. 10. Karen says the nursery industry favors plants that fit on trucks and sell easily, not always the most useful varieties for gardeners. 11. Karen links marigolds to Day of the Dead in India and Mexico, where petals and scent are used to guide beloved family members to the altar or cemetery. 12. She also describes Victorian mourning customs where marigolds on a front door wreath could signal extreme grief. 13. Jessica brings up a 2025 review on observing versus creating flowers for art therapy and says photographs of flowers produced more joy than drawings in the study. 14. Karen responds that her own work uses archival photography and 19th-century botanical illustrations in collage and written projects. 15. Jessica and Karen discuss pressed flowers as a craft that can look dusty or modern depending on presentation, materials, and context. 16. Karen describes a 2017 year-long flower-pressing project that helped her stay grounded during a difficult period. 17. She says the project used flowers from walks, birthdays, weddings, funerals, and trips, then became a bound object marking her year. 18. The conversation is interview-based, curious, and practical, with Jessica steering from research to personal stories and workshop examples. 19. People interested in flowers, art therapy, symbolism, and botanical crafts would likely enjoy this episode. 20. People who want a fast celebrity interview or light gardening tips may skip it.

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