From musician and teacher to wife and mother, it took years to find the career that sparked my heart with joy, 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 corduroy and Peter Pan collars and took me to the San Francisco flower market to gather blooms for her orders and weddings. I carried her shiny Cottage Garden badge to the vendors, who often slipped me leftover stems — my makeshift fairy wands as we walked the aisles.

I never imagined that, more than twenty years later, I would return to my own flower market — older now, without my mother or her badge — and be undone by a single fragrance. It was one of those breath-catching moments when past and present suddenly meet, tender and familiar, like strangers who somehow know your name.

Cottage Garden sprouted for the second time that day.

While it’s taken many different forms over the past 6 years, the Cottage Garden Florals of today has found its own cobbled path. Weeds have sprouted between the stones occasionally, and my foot has caught on a nearby tree root now and again. But what I have found is that on either side of the cobblestones, whichever direction I am going, there is
— undoubtedly — inspiration, growth, and the promise of changing seasons.

I think that the loveliest bit I have learned thus far on my windy, uneven, breathtakingly beautiful path has been that I approach each design opportunity as something familiar. What I have found in the process is that my past actually informs my present... each stem placement, every flower selection, the very inspiration I seek.

My work feels like a return — to the gardens I've loved, the countryside paths I’ve walked with my family, and the quiet roads speckled with wildflowers that lead me home.

When I design flowers for you, look for the familiarity in them. Each design is artful in presentation, but I think you might find that it feels like it could have bloomed in your grandmother’s backyard, the garden you lingered in in England, the meadow where your beloved proposed.

This is my Cottage Garden.