The goal of Flora-L Designs is to inspire curiosity and fascination with the natural patterns produced by plants, algae and fungi. With every Flora-L pattern and product, you will receive a beautiful and unique design to share. We hope to inspire you to look at the world around you with curiosity and appreciation for the intricate patterns made by nature.
Judith at the stereomicroscope taking images of tiny details.
Our pattern process starts with natural materials, usually plants, but sometimes also fungi or algae. Our starting material can be samples we have collected in the wild on a nature walk, or plants grown in the greenhouse for research purposes, or even house plants. Depending on the type of image we want to generate, we might process the samples by preserving the tissues in wax to cut very thin slices, or sometimes we might just make slices from fresh material by hand with a razor blade. After cutting the samples they can then be viewed under a microscope, either stained with a dye or unstained. It is from the microscope images of those sections that we create one-of-a-kind Flora-L patterns.
Here comes an example of one of our patterns:
Linnaea borealis is commonly found in boreal and subarctic regions as a small flowering plant in the forest understory.
The plant tissue is cut into thin slices.
The thin sections of plant tissues are stained to visualize certain types of compounds.
We visualize the sections under a microscope and select an interesting feature to make a pattern out of it.
Our final products made out of two different magnifications of the same pattern.