Susan and calendar designer Jerry Gross at the New York Botanical Garden 

In the spring of 2012 because of a mutual interest in flower arranging, I had the good fortune to meet Jerry Gross, a master floral designer and graphic artist who took an interest in my artwork. Jerry wanted to find a way to collaborate by doing something with my paintings—we didn’t know exactly what, but we had fun exploring. We met every few weeks to throw around ideas. We would also often take a stroll outside to enjoy what was blooming in the garden, and sometimes, to my great delight, Jerry would make an exquisite arrangement with the branches and flowers I brought in from the garden. I so enjoyed sharing my love of the botanical world with Jerry—from what was growing outdoors to arranging it to painting it that I anticipated these visits with great pleasure.

One day Jerry arrived carrying some 11” x 17” pages that he had printed out. He had come upon the idea of creating a calendar based on my artwork, and he showed me his initial design for the month of June using my painting Two Irises and a Bud. I was very excited by what I saw. And my husband and friends were blown away. This was the idea we had been waiting for! We looked through my paintings to find more that would lend themselves to the calendar design, and we then selected the ones that would be “blooming” each month of the year and so best represent the seasons. Jerry would work on the designs at home and then come back and spread them out on my living room floor, where we would deliberate over layout and color choices for each page. As we refined the design, we asked for feedback and benefitted especially from the advice of my friend Stephanie, a magazine editor with a discerning eye. We worked like this for a few months until finally we had all twelve months ready.

Now we needed to find a printer who would faithfully reproduce every color in the calendar the way it was meant to be, bind it elegantly, and do this at an affordable price. Local printers turned out to be very expensive, so we were resigning ourselves to the likelihood that we would not be able to sell the calendars after all, just give them away as gifts. Then I showed the calendar to my friend Alan, who gave me the name of his printer in Iowa, and new possibilities opened up for us.

By November of 2012 we had the calendar in hand. Almost everyone who saw the calendar wanted one. We gave many away as holiday gifts. We knew it was late in the year for sales, but to our surprise, we also sold quite a lot of them—so many that we had to do a reprint. The level of interest in the calendar in our local communities was such that we decided it was worth doing a 2014 edition of the calendar using the same images, this time for a wider market. 

At Stephanie’s encouragement, I sent the New York Botanical Garden a copy of the 2014 edition. And to our delight the NYBG Shop in the Garden decided to place a sizeable order. Jerry and I delivered the calendars on a fine morning in June, spent the day enjoying the gardens, and then came back to the Shop in the Garden, where we were thrilled to see the beautiful calendar display they had set up.

P.S. Since then we have contacted other botanical gardens and historical homes around the country and are pleased to report that we have succeeded in placing the 2014 calendar in many of them. Meanwhile, we are now busy at work on the 2015 calendar!