At some point in the last few years, bookstores became flower shops. It happened the way overgrowth can take an untended garden: slowly at first, and then all at once. The dust jackets of new fiction were suddenly filled with floral print.

Lush, colorful, and—importantly—anchored in a generous punch of white typography, these designs span publishing houses and genres. Racked’s Julia Rubin alerted me and the rest of Twitter to the trend last summer, and then they were everywhere. They were in the neighborhood bookstore, on the subway, on Instagram accounts, The New York Times Book Review.

Courtesy of Sarabande Books. Courtesy of Knopf. Courtesy of Riverhead Books.

Sometimes the flowers are a centered bouquet; other times they stretch to the ends of the frame. Sometimes they’re photos or paintings that evoke Old Masters of Northern Europe and sometimes they’re illustrations that evoke Rifle Paper Co. greeting cards. Sometimes they look plucked from the ornate canvases of Kehinde Wiley’s portraits. (The Brooklyn Museum hosted a Wiley exhibition three years ago; my pet theory for the sudden rush to fill a background with florals. After all, when else has a presidential portrait matched so many book clubs?)

You’ll most likely find the jackets wrapped around fiction by women, but rarely are they expressly feminine—gone are the cartoon silhouettes or kicky cocktails. They’re usually pure maximalism, a corrective for the single green plant against a white-walled interior, which took over decor and fashion photography circa 2015, or millennial pink, which took over everything else.

When asked to name that trend, Rubin called them “bouquet books,” a term I’m finding more and more useful, and, frankly, delightful. The only thing more appealing than an armful of flowers is an armful of books. Now, with bouquet books, you can have both.

It’s not just Baader-Meinhof phenomenon run amok; florals are a seductive solution for a book-cover designer because they easily convey a mood without shoehorning an image into the reader’s head. Nayon Cho is the senior designer at Penguin Books who created the cover for Zinzi Clemmons’s debut novel, What We Lose. She sees “wonderful metaphors” in plants and flowers. “[Flowers] can be bursting with life and health, or drooping towards death,” she said. “They can be comforting, menacing, melancholy, life-affirming. They can convey so much human drama through an incredibly expressive shorthand.”

Flowers, Cho adds, are such a well-tread motif stretching back through centuries of art that it’s always “possible to find a piece that says exactly what you want to say on a book cover.” One can see how vegetation would be a useful front for non-traditional narratives like Clemmons’s. The loss of a woman’s mother is told in fragments—vignettes, articles, studies—and spans time, continents, and shifting racial identities. Photographs along with images of women or girls were rejected early on for being “too representational,” before Cho settled on the work of artist Mary Kuper, which said “domestic spaces” and “life bursting from every page.”

Another early example that crystallized the look for me was Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, the American edition released in 2016. Its cover zooms in on a crop of rich, painterly flowers by water. Fat, white letters announce the title. It’s unmissable. The close-up of all that life gestures effectively toward the story, which is very short on plot, but full of lucid observations under the magnifying glass of an unnamed woman’s mind. New York magazine’s Meaghan O’Connell wrote that year, “A few chapters in, I took a photo of the perfect cover and put it on Instagram—an act it was perhaps made for—thereby proclaiming myself only mildly exasperated by and totally in love with this book.”