“French Blooms” author Sandra Sigman inscribes her book, “Always bloom where you are planted.”
For her that means Les Fleurs, the Andover flower shop that she and her mother started 34 years ago.
Here, in the Barnard Street shop, just off Main Street, flowers are arranged by hue in the flower bar, perfuming the air and pleasing the eye.
“It’s soothing,” Sigman says.
During a visit to Les Fleurs earlier this summer, the flowers at the bar included those grown locally at farms and in Sigman’s garden, among them lisianthus, ranunculus, coral bells, peonies and delphiniums.
Customers browsed shelves of woven baskets, ceramics, bell-shaped glass cloches and tureens. There were also farm, yard and household containers awaiting potting soil or water, plants or flowers.
Here were light-colored ironstone containers, watering cans, teapots, milk urns and small 70-year-old jars that once held grape juice.
Jazz and blues vocalist Billie Holiday sang of light and despair.
Sigman’s store design is arranged, like her flowers and her book, to elicit happiness.
“I feel like I wanted it — when folks walked in — to be just, ‘Ahhh,’” she says.
Behind the counter, in the backroom, six florists in neat aprons cut flower stems and arranged bouquets, centerpieces and corsages.
Noelle Proulx-DeCain prepared a white rose for a corsage, turning the stem in her hand and viewing the petals from all sides and gently coaxing the bloom.
Sigman became enamored of flowers in childhood through her mom, Madonna, who operated a home floral business in Worcester.
It was exciting and fast-paced, an American enterprise. They would scramble for their blooms at the Boston Flower Exchange and rush home to arrange them for sale in local supermarkets.
In her early 20s, Sigman, a figure skater, performed in Paris. She skated at night but spent her days interning at a floral shop, learning to arrange in the French style and how flowers have a place in daily life there.
“The city had intrigue, beauty and style unlike anything I’d ever encountered before,” she writes in “French Blooms,” which was published in March and, as of June, had gone through three printings and sold 25,000 copies.
At 23 years old and homesick, she decided to bring French flower sensibilities to Andover. Her mom had breast cancer and died a month after they opened their flower shop.
The book is dedicated to her mom and one of the two “French Blooms” photographers, Kindra Clineff, of Topsfield, who died in 2022.
In France, Sigman was apprenticed in the native approach to flowers, as well as in methods. She learned to be more selective in the blooms she bought at the market and to favor seasonal varieties and to use exotic greenery such as wands of rosemary.
Back home she cultivated her own French cutting garden.
Her book balances photography with anecdotes and tips on flower size, color and arrangements for setting on tables, counters or mantels.
On a counter in her office space are dozens of “French Blooms” books in gift bags, the books set in gray tissue paper.
She’s learned from online comments that people keep their book bedside for night reading, take it to the beach and out into the garden.
So, do France and Andover have anything in common?
Sigman says that downtown Andover has more mom-and-pop stores than other downtowns. Also like France, people know each other.
She meets people whose weddings she provided flowers for 20 years ago, then their baby showers and now their children’s weddings.
Sigman’s affection for France remains. She and her husband, Scott Sigman, an orthopedic surgeon, own an apartment in Paris close to the floral shop where she interned three decades ago.
But she is planted here, and it is here where she cultivates blooms.