From musician to teacher to wife to mother to dreamer, it took a minute to find the career which my soul loved, but floral design was planted in my heart decades before Cottage Garden Florals was born.

Well, reborn, actually. 

Cottage Garden began with my mother, Claudine. In the dark of many early mornings, she dressed me in layers of tights and corduroy and Peter Pan collars to accompany her to the San Francisco flower market for stock for her weekly orders and occasional weddings. I would show the vendors her shiny Cottage Garden badge that allowed us to shop with them, and they would hand me leftover flowers to wave about as a magic wand while we walked. It didn’t occur to me then as a sparkly-eyed, curly-headed little moppet with a Carnation fairy wand that I would visit my local flower market over twenty years later, slightly less moppet-ish, missing my sweet mother and her laminated Cottage Garden badge, and be completely overwhelmed with emotion by a scent that had long been filed away neatly into my memory rolodex. It was one of those breath-catching moments in life where Past and Present unexpectedly bump into one another — familiar strangers.

Cottage Garden sprouted for the second time that day.

In the beginning, Cottage Garden Florals often looked and smelled and felt and sounded like tip-toeing into my mother’s rose-leaf-studded, dimly-lit, refrigerator-humming garage studio in the depths of a stressful wedding week — if you know, you know — but without the promise of the beautiful miracle of that wedding day final product. I wasn’t sure if it would ever mature into the vision I had for it. But as slowly as a sprout grows (which, by the way, is almost too slow to perceive without a handy time-lapse) and with many leftover carnations, it’s grown and taken me from a strangely familiar path to one with its own lovely meaning and route. Don’t get me wrong — it’s still messy, full of mistakes and much-too-wild Queen Anne’s Lace, not to mention the fact that our garage is in a constant state of floral decomposition, but this, this Cottage Garden is blossoming from the sprout of its beginning.

When you see me with my own curly-headed moppet strolling the aisles at the market, you can be sure that Cottage Garden seeds are being planted with each wave of her Carnation wand.