Check Me Out - Haven May 2026

HOW FLOWERS MADE OUR WORLD

By David George Haskell

Here is a book that will change the way you look at every flower you walk past. Haskell makes a passionate and scientific case for flowers - magnolias, orchids, roses, and even seagrasses - as the true architects of life on Earth. Far from just being decorative, flowers are the revolutionaries that reshaped our environment and drove our own evolution. Bonus if you read this where you can see our Florida flowers blooming.

THE PECULIAR GARDEN OF HARRIET HUNT

By Chelsea Iversen

Set in 1860s Victorian London, this atmospheric novel follows Harriet, a woman who has spent her whole life with only her overgrown garden for company. When her father, an ill-tempered controlling man, mysteriously disappears - Harriet is the prime suspect. Harriet thinks she will find protection in the arms of a charming man, but not everything is how it seems. She must find the confidence to trust her own power over her circumstances.

ART FROM THE GARDEN

By Kerry Michaels

For the reader who would rather make something than sit still, this gorgeous book is the perfect companion to usher in the warmer months. Artist Kerry Michaels walks readers through 25 step-by-step projects using materials from gardens: pressed flowers, frozen botanical luminarias, cyanotype prints made with a branch and sunshine, vases from twigs, wrapped stones, and more. Beautifully photographed and practically organized, it is the kind of book you prop open and actually use.

COOKING WITH FLOWERS

By Miche Bacher

If you have ever looked at a pot of nasturtiums or a spray of lavender and thought … I wonder if they’re tasty? Well, this cookbook is your answer. Bacher, an herbalist and chef, offers over 100 recipes built entirely around edible blooms, from pansy petal pancakes and rosemary flower margaritas to savory sunflower chickpea salad. There is also guidance on infusing flowers into vinegar, jelly, sugar, and ice cream. A beautiful, practical book that makes your garden feel like a pantry.

WHERE THE WILDFLOWERS GROW

By Terah Shelton Harris

Leigh is the lone survivor of a prison bus crash and knows she must carry on to survive. By chance, she stumbles upon a flower farm tucked away in rural Alabama and finds a family who has built something real from the ruins of their own lives. Harris writes with the kind of compassion that asks readers to sit with themselves for a while. This is an emotional and heartfelt novel examining what it means to stop surviving and start living.

THE FLOWER GIRLS

By Alice Clark-Platts

A child goes missing at a hotel over the holiday season. Among the guests is a woman who, as a young girl, was convicted in a notorious child murder case and has since been living under a new identity. Be warned that this is an unsettling book, with a central question of when a child does something terrible, do they remain guilty forever? This is a dark book with real emotional depth hiding beneath the suspense; the kind of thriller you think about long after you have finished it.

THE BEAR

By Andrew Krivak

It is tricky to describe this book in a way that doesn’t make it sound ominous. A father and daughter, the last two humans on Earth, live close to the land where he teaches her to fish, to hunt, to read the seasons and the stars. And then she is alone. What follows is a fable that somehow is both spare and luminous- it is a survival story that balances between hope and despair. The story is full of magical flora and fauna and a profound sense that the natural world is not lost, only waiting.

BROMELIAD HOUSE

By Jessika Grewe Glover

If you have spent any time in Florida, you will recognize the landscape immediately: the humidity, the sprawling old estate, the sense that something lush and wild is always threatening to take over. Delphine has spent her life seeing the reflections of loved ones just before they die. When she inherits her family’s crumbling estate, the line between the living and the not-quite-dead begins to blur in unsettling ways. Glover’s imagery transports you to a humid and haunted Florida.