The next astronomical spring begins tomorrow, though local weather calls for rain. Many neighbors are planning their gardens, and hopefully there is more interest in establishing some community plantings in tree wells, alleys, and lots, perhaps in preparation for the Richmond2015 UCI bicycle races.

Don’t forget Hollywood Cemetery’s Volunteer Rose Pruning And Maintenance Day on Saturday.

This spring you may also want to consider attending the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ new exhibit, “Van Gogh, Manet, and Matisse: The Art of the Flower”.

This exhibition is the first major American exhibition to consider the French floral still life across the 19th century. Developed from the strong partnerships fostered by the French Regional American Museum Exchange (FRAME), the exhibition is organized by Mitchell Merling, Paul Mellon Curator and head of the Department of European Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Heather MacDonald, the Lillian and James H. Clark Associate Curator of European Art at the Dallas Museum of Art.

The exhibition explores the infusion of new spirit and meaning into the traditional genre of floral still-life painting in 19th-century France, even as the advent of modernism was radically transforming the art world. It features more than 60 flower paintings by more than 30 artists, including well-known painters such as Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, Henri Fantin-Latour, Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri Matisse, as well as less familiar figures such as Antoine Berjon and Simon Saint-Jean. These artists, whose careers collectively span the nineteenth century, engaged in a sophisticated reworking of traditional imagery, bringing the floral still life into dialogue with emerging models of science and commerce, and ultimately transforming the genre into a meditation on the nature of artistic representation itself.

There’s even a portion of the exhibit space that allows visitors to try their artistic hand at drawing flowers with colored pencils.