Discovered: A blooming bower

My visit to the Philadelphia Flower Show last week only whetted my late-winter appetite for blossoms and bracts of every sort. So before I left work for the day, I grabbed a review copy of Tricia Guild's latest book,

Flower Sense

, and took it home to revel in.

Guild, the British designer of fabrics and home furnishings, is one of my favorite decorating-book authors. Without a doubt, she's the person I'd pick to design that Italian villa I fantasize about - the color and informality she creates is transformational to spirit as well as space.

In Flower Sense, due in stores next month from Rizzoli ($40) but available for order at online bookstores, Guild urges readers to make blooms a constant part of the decor, not to bring them in as an afterthought. She has subtitled this volume "The Art of Decorating With Flowers," and that mission is articulated in James Merrell's lush photos of blooms, many in room settings.

Use flowers, Guild suggests, to change mood, enlivening a space with vibrant colors and quirky forms, or calming it with subdued hues and relaxing fragrance. Match the flowers to your decor - or your decor to the flowers you love, she exhorts. There's no one right way to do this, though some flowers have acquired associations with certain decorating styles.

To guide us, Guild and cowriter Elspeth Thompson break the book down into design sensibilities - city and country, vintage and modern, romantic and minimal - and elucidates which blossoms are thought to reflect them. Yet she also urges readers to play against type: "Violets and hydrangeas . . . seem to hark back to Victorian times," she writes, "but surely that's a cue to reinvent them, with minimal styling and contemporary containers."

A lot of this may seem obvious to florists and gardeners. But to those of us who grew up amid brick and concrete, for whom flowers were the stuff of funerals and holidays, Guild offers "aha!" moments with just about every page.

- Joanne McLaughlin