Tuesday Treasures: Zuzu's Garden

I'm a romantic at heart. I love Sleepless in Seattle, pretty boxes, chocolate, fresh cut flowers, and old jazz standards. So I was delighted to stumble across Zuzu's Garden in my wanderings this week and instantly fell in love.

Offering what it calls "handcrafted garden-inspired home accents and gifts," Zuzu's Garden is a sun-dappled meadow full of flowers, butterflies, and delicate skyblue eggs masquerading as whimsical fairy keepsakes and framed cross-stitch or pressed botanicals.

At this writing, the keepsakes called Woodland Fairy Collectibles consist of 4 designs, each a tiny, painted, papier-mache box topped with vintage silk and preserved flowers and plants and containing a small paper bearing the Shakespearean verse or Elizabethan lyric or poem that inspired the box's design. My favorite is Titania's Woodland Bouquet, an oval keepsake topped with pink roses, tiny fern-like fronds, yellow twigs, and a pale pink velvet ribbon.

The Cottage Garden Miniature Cross-Stitch Collection consists of cross-stitched miniatures of designs by Dutch artist Marjolein Bastin. The small works (the largest measures roughly 4.5 x 4") are sewn in soft colors on antique-white fabric and framed in creamy, whitewashed wood frames. My favorites are the Butterfly Threesome, a set of 3 tiny (life-sized?) butterflies, and Three-ball Topiary, a modified design daintily stitched and perfect for a cottage mantlepiece or tucked into a bookshelf or plant-filled ledge. It's a little taste of Old Europe.

But my favorite part of the entire site, the pièce de résistance, is the Pressed Botanicals Collection, dried and framed collages consisting of pressed flowers and leaves, sheet music, old letters, elegant and pretty paper, original drawings and artwork, and whitewashed wooden frames unique to each work. All of them are absolutely gorgeous, and it seems a shame to single any out, but I absolutely fell in love with the shower of delicate lavender petals in Loves Me and the wild roses and sheet music of Moonlight Sonata. Thinking of You consists of vintage letters and stamps beneath the deep violet petals and graceful green leaves of Epilobium angustifolium, and Zuzu's own artwork is showcased floating over vintage ledger papers in the feathered grass of Cecropia Study.

If Zuzu's Garden leaves you craving more, her links page leads to a plethora of sites for the garden-craving cottage set. It's a nice slow way to laze away a romantic, sunny afternoon.