In the designer Sourabh Gupta’s studio, in a nondescript apartment building in East Harlem, flowers bloom on nearly every surface. Towers of hollyhock animate one corner with their showy hot-pink-and-white blossoms. On a nearby bookshelf, pale lady’s slippers, Carolina roses and strawberry buds spring from earthenware pots. Gupta moves about gently tending to his nursery — not with pruning shears and trowels, but with tweezers and a magnifying glass. Only up close is it clear that these perennials are all made of paper, stunningly lifelike down to each delicate pistil and stamen.

Since moving to this apartment several months ago, Gupta has been nurturing his paper garden in a room of only 120 square feet. But he is used to seeing beyond the constraints of his circumstances. When he was growing up in a small village in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, Gupta says, his family of five lived in a windowless room no bigger than this studio. Even then, he created obsessively, making fanciful paintings and sculptures with whatever materials he could find. Now, at 29, Gupta is parlaying his resourcefulness into a fledgling design practice, and his paper flora have caught the attention of the worlds of fashion and design. In May, his work ascended the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as embellishment on the fashion designer Tory Burch’s gown at the Costume Institute’s annual gala. Beyond creating botanicals for a number of private clients, Gupta is also in the process of incorporating his young art, architecture and design studio.