Elvina Farkas is looking again at the plants we call weeds

I’m a third-culture kid who grew up in the middle of the Australian outback, so I think the juxtaposition of my unusual upbringing probably made a life in the creative arts almost inevitable.

For much of my career, I worked as a fashion photographer, shooting for international publications and working with luxury fashion houses and designer brands across South East Asia and China. I later moved into creative direction, working alongside agencies and commercial brands on television, digital and mass-media campaigns.

Like so many people, COVID became a kind of reset. A lot changed in my life, and somewhere along the way I realised I had lost touch with the things that made me feel most present and internally fulfilled.

Flowers, home-gardening and reconnecting with my love of photography have become part of finding my way back to that inner peace.

I started my IG account as a place to just simply document that process, and the word “journal” still feels very fitting because I’m very much at the beginning of this new chapter of learning to grow, arrange and photograph everything botanical, in a way that feels true to my own, unique voice.

Flowers were probably part of my creative life long before I consciously recognised them as such.

Working in fashion publication and photography, botanical references were everywhere: in textiles, embroidery, set design, campaigns, couture, colour palettes and visual storytelling. Some of the most beautiful collaborations I’ve ever encountered were between designers, artists and the natural world.

But my relationship with flowers changed when I began growing them myself in my small urban backyard.

Suddenly, I wasn’t only looking at the finished product. I was watching life emerge from a seed, observing how the stem would grow, how the petals changed from one day to the next and even how the flowers responded to light, heat or rain.

In photography, you can manipulate a great deal: movement, light, framing, colour, timing. Working with nature reminds you that you are collaborating with something you cannot fully control.

Flowers have taught me to slow down, observe first and impose my ideas second, and I think that’s a really beautiful way to approach creativity, especially in this day and age where we’re constantly under pressure to consume and produce mass amounts of work, too quickly.

I think flowers are one of those rare things that can carry meaning across cultures without needing much explanation.

My own family is a real mix of cultures — my father is Hungarian and my mother is Singaporean-Malay, my husband is Italian, and our son is Ghanaian — so between all the different facets of religion and culture, I’ve learnt how plants, flowers and food become part of tradition, ritual and memory.

Flowers seem to appear at the moments that matter most: weddings, funerals, religious celebrations, family gatherings and festivals. One flower can mark joy, grief, faith, love and remembrance, then carry that significance through a lifetime in a person's memory.

For me personally, that connection has become even more intimate through my garden. I grow certain flowers because they remind me of particular people, places or periods of my life. Sometimes a plant becomes less about what it looks like and more about who or what it brings back to me.

That’s probably what I find most powerful about flowers. They can be beautiful, of course, but they can also hold memories. They make flowers feel less like a commodity and more like a connection between people, places and time.

At the moment, I’m fascinated by the idea of plants we dismiss as weeds.

We are often taught to see weeds as unwanted, messy or invasive without necessarily understanding what the plant is, where it came from, what role it may have played historically, or how people once used it.

Of course, there are plants that can genuinely damage local ecosystems, and those distinctions matter. But I’m interested in the broader question of how quickly we decide that something botanical is “unworthy”.

I’ve been reading more about the historical, medicinal, culinary and cultural uses of common plants, and I love the idea of looking at them again through a creative lens.

What happens if we stop seeing something as a weed for a moment and simply look at its form, texture, structure or story?

Sometimes the most ordinary plant becomes incredibly beautiful once you actually pay attention to it.

Everywhere, really.

Fashion and photography will probably always be my foundation, so I’m constantly drawn to colour, silhouette, texture, proportion, negative space and light.

But I also love books, cinema, architecture, painting, old photographs, interiors and learning about things that seemingly have nothing to do with flowers at all.

I think inspiration often comes from making connections between unrelated things.

Even walking around the neighbourhood with my children can give me ideas. It might be the colour of peeling paint against a plant, a strange combination of textures, the shape of a shadow, or something growing through a crack in the pavement.

Photography taught me that observation is a creative skill and there is inspiration everywhere, but you have to slow down enough to notice it.

I think more people should think about the entire life cycle of flowers, rather than only the moment when they are at their most perfect.

We are so conditioned to celebrate the flawless bloom, but there is incredible beauty in every other stage too: the bud, the half-open flower, petals beginning to fall, seed heads forming, stems drying and eventually the plant returning to the soil.

Growing flowers has made me much more conscious of that cycle.

After living in such a tropical part of the world for so long, returning to Australia has made me realise just how extraordinary and biodiverse our native flora really is.

We’re incredibly lucky to have some of the most visually striking and unusual plant life in the world, and I think there’s a growing appreciation for just how special it is. Flannel flowers, mulla mulla, kangaroo paw, billy buttons, paper daisies, proteas and so many others have such distinctive forms, colours and textures that makes them feel very sculptural.

Flowers have taught me to explore deeper, there’s something incredibly grounding about discovering the plants that are available in the landscapes around you.

Play. That is probably the simplest answer.

I want to give myself permission to explore flowers without necessarily needing every experiment to become a finished arrangement or a photograph.

I’d love to continue learning different traditions and techniques, from contemporary floristry to ikebana and more historical approaches, and then see what naturally stays with me.

That is similar to how I learned photography. You study the rules, understand the technique, look at the people who came before you, and then slowly begin to work out what feels like your own voice.

I’m particularly interested in bringing photography and flowers closer together: growing specific varieties because I want to photograph them, creating botanical still lifes, working with unusual or overlooked plant material, and exploring flowers through different stages of life and decay.

Ultimately, I think I’m curious to see where all these parts of my creative life intersect.

Flowers feel like a new medium to me right now, but in many ways I think I’m still doing what I have always done: observing the world around me and trying to turn what I notice into something tangible.