In Honor of National Floral Design Day (Feb 28th)

This career is so much more than a job; more than playing with flowers all day, more than everyone’s post retirement dream, more than the largest order we have ever designed and delivered.

I am fascinated by sign language interpreters; watching them as they take the spoken word and express it to their audience. Yes, they communicate with specific motions and contortions of their hands, but you can understand the emotion or tone in which the words were spoken by watching the interpreter’s facial expressions and the velocity at which they move their hands – for some conversations there is a grace to their movements as if their hands are dancing and for other conversations there is an intensity to their movements indicating an urgency to the words.

Floral design is a lot like interpreting verbally expressed words into a visual language. We listen to the stories, the emotions, the occasion, the relationships, and the intended message – we then interpret all of those elements into the language of flowers. As floral artists, we speak in color palettes, textures of flower petals, the size and shapes of flower blooms, different fragrance from each flower, and the special traditional meaning behind some flowers; and all of this is before we even begin to combine and design these blooms and bring to life visually what the sender’s heart wants to convey.

Our hearts and minds are constantly absorbing the language of emotion and sentiment, and our hands are constantly arranging the flowers into the visual representation of those emotions and sentiments. Many florists can copy a picture from a .com site, or send a generic arrangement to your loved one, you can find flowers for your dining room table at the same place you find food for your dining room table. But the little piece of the designer’s heart and soul that goes into an arrangement is something that you don’t get from a .com, 1800 number or mass produced bunch of flowers in the grocery store.

Yes, flowers are pretty, everyone can see that, but when flowers speak, very few can hear that and those that can will do everything in their ability to put those words on display and then flowers become more than simply pretty.

Flowers mark many milestones and occasions in our lives, and as floral designers, we love that our clients and friends invite us into those moments. From the flowers for the first date and the stories you tell us, to the wedding when we get to see the bride before all of you and we share the first look of her flowers with her, the anniversaries and Valentine’s days that will follow, the newborn babies complete with sending your florist pictures of your new addition because of course we are vested in your life at this point, the Mother’s days, birthdays and congratulations that will come each year, to the final floral tributes that will culminate all of those moments, all of those memories; the laughter and the tears, the love and the years. It is an honor to be welcomed into all of these stories and life events.

In one day we will interpret the many emotions of life – joy, love, sadness, grief, gratitude and celebration. Last week I designed ballerina flowers to celebrate a little princess’s birthday, and the same day I designed a casket spray to honor the life of a little six month old. We never know what a day will hold, who will need a shoulder and who will need a hand, but every day we know that someone will need our heart, and what more of a purpose could one ask for in a career, than to share their heart.