One spring evening in 2015, graphic designer Samuel Zeller got off a train one stop early after a bad day at work in Geneva and visited a botanical garden with a camera. He was not a keen horticulturalist but in the time he spent amongst the glasshouses he reawakened a childhood passion for nature, which would, in turn, set him on a new career path. When he later looked at the photographs he’d taken that evening, he realized that it was part of a much bigger project.
Over the next two years, Zeller, who now works full time as a photographer, visited botanical gardens in capital cities from Paris and Prague to Porto and many more sites across Scotland, Belgium, and France and his photographs have now been compiled into a charming small book, Botanical (£16.95; Amazon UK).
Photography by Samuel Zeller, courtesy of Hoxton Mini Press.
Flashes of color appear from the depths of the glasshouses in an impressionistic haze—the tomato-red tubular flowers of coral plant (Russelia equisetiformis Plantaginaceae) or the lush green of a twisting frond of a tree fern (Cyathea sp. Cyatheaceae).
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