Inspired By
Keiki Club
by Elena Seegers
Le Fleuriste International is an ongoing project by Elena Seegers and Simon de Dreuille, based in New York and Paris about the cut flower economy and culture. Elena now lives full time in New York and has founded Le Fleuriste NYC, a bespoke private-floristry company that focuses on locally sourced, nobly grown blooms.
Keiki Club is a simple but beautiful idea - plant enthusiasts, professional florists and botanical amateurs of all kinds come together and exchange plant clippings, chat fervishly about botany and share a glass of rosé every other month on a rooftop in Brooklyn, New York. There’s no schedule, no agenda, just the rooted clippings and the curiosity of each participant.
“I had an amazing elderly neighbour in my previous apartment called Denise", explains Aviva, a passionate flower person and founder of the club. "All her plants had beautiful stories that she would recount; how she mischievously smuggled clippings, hid exotic orchids from her travels and propagated them for her rooftop garden. When she passed, she left me some of her books and plants including one’s she’d given me clippings of. Keiki Club stems from this and really is all about stories - by sharing a clipping of a plant that you love and live with, it carries on and in turn becomes someone else's story - another branch as it were. We then publish a zine with the different tales told for the following meeting. It’s a lovely excuse for plant people to get together and chat, but most of all for loved plants to propagate gratis through New York, a continuing legacy.”