A new hybrid of flower has always occasioned celebration by gardeners and amateur botanists everywhere.  It is hard to think of anything more innocently irresistible than a flower, new or familiar, while an imagined one must surely bring a special frisson of excitement.  Or so I thought, on the day in June when such a flower grew in my mind's eye and demanded to be painted.  Once begun, the experiment widened into an entire garden.  They bloomed all at once, as if to race with a short summer, and soon there were twelve canvases of twelve flowers waiting to be named.

     —from Dorothea Tanning: Birthday and Beyond.  Exhibition brochure.  Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000.