The Accidental Florist

Those who know me intimately can hardly imagine that there was once a time when flowers never really elicited much of a response from me. I found them pretty enough, sure, but I would never pay close enough attention to them. This is hardly the case now; flowers and foliage dictate much of my creative and meditative practices. I feel like I think and speak in two languages: food and flowers. I squeal with excitement when I see a patch of wild foliage ripe for foraging. When I drive by interesting neighbourhoods with wild vines, foreign-looking trees or shrubbery, or overgrown flowering plants spilling over sidewalks, I try my best to memorize their locations so I can go back to these places to take photographs of the plants. I love visiting botanical conservatories. I will stop in the middle of the street with my heavy bags of groceries to take iPhone photographs of crawling clematis vines, camellia blooms scattered on the ground, or... say... persimmon trees with their unripe fruit. There was such a tree near my old apartment in Riley Park, and I would visit that tree everyday to observe the fruit go from green to bright orange. I was always too shy to ask the caretaker of that yard if I could snip off one branch to use for floral arrangements, so I would take multiple iPhone photos of it instead.

I will, quite literally, stop and smell the flowers.

If the opportunity affords me, I do some stealthy foraging in residential alleys, taking note of the ones that spill over fences so I can snip a few branches here and there. I believe in responsible urban foraging; I never steal from people's yards or gardens, I only snip from abandoned lots and overgrown residential alleyways, and I always leave more than enough for the plant to be able to re-grow.

Up until a few months ago, dried flowers and grasses covered every square inch of my dining room’s ceiling. In fact, when my husband and I found ourselves having to pack up our belongings for an international move, I gave a call out on my Instagram Stories, offering to make my local followers dried arrangements out of my own dryables for free as long as they provide me with a vase. They were all claimed within a couple of hours. The people who claimed my dried flowers did me the favour, in all honesty. I could not bear to throw all those dried flowers away. My heart swelled with joy and relief, knowing that the flowers and foliage I dried carefully over seasons past would continue on to enjoy a second life in their lovely homes.

*

In 2015, I accepted a job as a personal assistant for renowned potter, Janaki Larsen. She was working to expand out of her own studio and open up a retail and gallery space a few doors down from her workspace. She wanted to rent out a portion of the new space to a business that would complement her own, so naturally, she was extremely picky over who she will want to rent the space to. The stars aligned when I discovered that some friends of mine—both freelance florists—were looking to open up a small storefront for their floral arrangements. They have outgrown running their business out of their living rooms, and were on the lookout for a small studio wherein they can work. I immediately connected them to Janaki, and it was a match made in heaven. In November 2016, Vancouver-based florists, The Wild Bunch, opened up their first storefront alongside Janaki Larsen’s very own concept store and gallery, which she named 7e7, after the building's numerical address.

Janaki’s operation was comprised of a small team back then; it was just her and me most days. She would spend her days glazing and throwing ceramic forms in her studio a few doors down, while I looked after the retail space by myself. Because this space was attached to The Wild Bunch, on quiet days, I would peek my head inside their floral studio to watch them work. I would often marvel at the flowers they brought in, most of which I have never seen before. The ladies of The Wild Bunch—Nassi and Al—have a very unique way of arranging flowers. Being largely self-taught, they let the nature of the ingredients they were working with inform their designs, only snipping away at bits to highlight the form of each branch, each piece of foliage, and each focal flower. The results of their designs look simultaneously lush and airy, a far cry from the more restrained traditional designs oft seen in grocery stores or overly formal wedding bouquets. They were touching on a new world in floristry, and I was lucky enough to witness their beginnings.

Al and Nassi would flit in and out of Janaki’s shop to borrow some of her handmade vessels. Sometimes, they would opt for a bowl, sometimes, a small vase. In those vessels, they would take mature blooms they can no longer sell and make arrangements to adorn the gallery. They would transform these mature blooms and those bits and bobs from snipped branches and foliage into these beautiful ikebana-style arrangements. Those ones were my favourites.

I did not realize what was happening to me back then—the slow burn turning into a blazing fire. Every week, the ladies of The Wild Bunch would send me home with cuttings too small for their arrangements, or flowers that have matured past their sell date. I treated these weekly gifts like treasures, and made small arrangements out of these for my apartment. It never looked as pretty as theirs, but they were my own. It was therapy. Through my day job working for a ceramic artist, as well as having a food and stills photography practice where I needed to have styling props of my own for a variety of shoots, I have, over those years, amassed a small collection of handmade vessels for myself. Those little flowers found a home in them. And though my apartment back then was extremely tiny, I always made room in one corner for my arrangements, like a makeshift grotto for some flower-loving deity, ever-changing, ever-evolving.

I started with ikebana-like arrangements. I bought my first kenzan (Japanese flower frog) from a Japanese supply store, and my first pairs of floral scissors and pruning shears that I got on sale from a hardware store. My arrangements were super restrained at that time; I had trouble cutting off big chunks from stems. The cutting proved to be the toughest hurdle to get over in my burgeoning floral arranging practice. It took me years—at least two or three—to be fearless when it came to this act of decisive trimming. I was too precious with them, too fearful. It was while photographing a professional floristry workshop in Salt Spring Island when what the instructor said stopped me in my tracks: “For years, I was afraid to trim down the stems. Don’t be afraid to make the cut! In cutting, you will reveal [the flower’s] form, its winding curves, its lines.”

Making decisive trims on stems turned out to be my own personal lesson in control—how to navigate the never-ending balance between when to take the reigns, and when to let go. Floristry taught me this. It is still teaching me lots about myself, six years down the road. I imagine it will continue to reveal aspects of myself I need to work on, and conversely, reveal to me just how much I have grown and evolved over time.

*

The global pandemic has driven two of my passions—cooking and floristry—to new and unexpected heights. Client work for restaurants slowed down to an almost-halt, and so, left with an over-abundance of time, I reworked my old recipes, photographed a lot of personal work, and played with lots of flowers. In the summer of 2020, I visited my favourite flower farmers’ market stalls on an almost weekly basis. Armfuls of blooms would accompany my groceries, and I would spend hours on my balcony, making arrangements. I reached out to some of my ceramicist friends to borrow some of their vessels, promising them composed studio photographs of my arrangements in their work. That summer marked one of my most prolific creative periods to date. This is not to say that all of them were successful; in fact, that summer led to more failures in my photographs than successes. Still, I was constantly experimenting, and in spite of my many photographic failures, I derived plenty of joy in that kind of freedom. It is a privilege I never took for granted, for how often does one get the opportunity to fail multiple times without much consequence?

*

I hesitate to call myself a florist because a part of me feels I am not deserving of this title. That started to shift a little when a friend of mine asked me to help her build a substantial floral install in front of her bakery. I wondered why, of all the people she knows, let alone all the very talented and established florists in the city, she chose me. “I really love the dried arrangement you made me,” she said, speaking of the dried arrangements I gave out to all my local followers on Instagram. “I like what you do! Will you help me? I’ll buy all the supplies; I just need help making this wall! I am not a florist.”

I thought, “Neither am I,” and was about to say so out loud, but I stopped myself. I really wanted this challenge. And as she started describing her vision to me, I was already sketching out the specifics of this floral build in my mind. So I took the job, but not before asking if I could bring a helper—a very good friend and extremely talented florist—with me. I told my baker friend to pay her, not me. "I’ll come along and help build it, of course, maybe take on the role of project leader?" She told me I was being ridiculous; of course she’ll pay us both. But I felt very much like an impostor. Should I really accept payment for floristry services when I do not consider myself a florist?

The install turned out so beautifully, that we received two more requests for holiday-themed floral installs for storefronts and restaurants in the same neighbourhood as my friend’s bakery. Then in February, that same baker friend asked me to do two major floral installs for the inside of her café. They were to be built during the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day. Valentine's Day is one of the busiest holidays for florists, so my florist friend could not join me for this commission. I wanted another challenge, so I decided to take this job, solo.

Once more, I felt the same nagging impostor syndrome inside of me; who on earth hires a food photographer for floristry services?

Those two installs took a total of 17 hours to build, but by the time they were finished, I felt an overwhelming sense of pride in myself. Maybe I am a florist, after all. Who says I have to be only one thing, anyway? Can’t I be a photographer, a cook, a recipe developer, a stylist, and a florist... all of these... simultaneously?

What on earth should I call myself?

*

As I write this, currently, my husband and I are stuck in between moves, waiting for important visas that will give us the go-ahead to cross the border into our new home in America. All of our belongings are in storage, including all of the tools of my trade: my flower shears and flower-arranging equipment, my kitchen tools, and my various photography and lighting gear. We did not think crossing would be this much of a bureaucratic nightmare, and as a result, we did not have the foresight to pack for this long of a limbo period. I certainly did not think I would have any use for my kenzan or my floral shears on the road...

So, as we bounce from one Airbnb to another with summer looming awfully close, living in homes that are not ours, the things I miss most about our belongings are, in no particular order:

a) sleeping in our very own bed,

b) cooking with our very own tools in a kitchen that is ours, and

c) arranging flowers in vessels that are mine.

I want to take advantage of the seasonal flowers being sold at our local farmers’ markets while we are still stuck here, so for my sanity’s sake, I recently bought myself a small kenzan to tide me over, plus another pair of floral shears, since, of course, the ones I normally use are currently in storage. I have to stay creative while in limbo, and flowers are my quickest artistic release at the moment, because they are so readily available to me. Residential alleyways, in all of their overflowing greenery, are now ripe for a little stealthy urban foraging, and summer markets are in full swing. Airbnb bowls and mugs have become my makeshift floral vessels, and with one small flower arrangement after another, suddenly, our Airbnb looks, at the very least, a little bit like it is ours.

A part of me wonders if I should always pack a kenzan and floral shears alongside my usual camera, toiletries, and underwear when we are all free to travel safely again.

I believe I will do just that.