Wild rose...

Flowers were my first medium as a young artist. Growing up in Alaska, I spent hours outside in the woods, garden, and by the creek on my grandparents’ homestead in Anchorage and then later on their gentleman's farm in the Matanuska Valley. On these visits, I foraged crabapple branches, wild roses, and flowers, gathering them into little bouquets that I left on the ledges, counters, and tables of my grandmother’s house. 

My return to flowers as a medium feels like a reconnection with my essential artistic spirit—the untarnished child version of my spirit that expressed without reserve and created and givengave with love. Alaska’s raw and wild landscape enriched my idea of beauty, rounding it out with a sense of  freedom that expresses itself through the open and untamed elements of my floral artistry today. My creative work with flowers provides a different experience every time, allowing me to live in the moment and surround myself with natural, seasonal beauty. It provides me the honor of noticing, celebrating, and passing that beauty on to others who, like me, long to be surrounded by beauty, and the untamed and wild elements of nature that hint at something equally wild in us.

To bring nature inside the home is to bring in aliveness, curiosity, and joy. Flowers carry a high vibrational energy. Words can only play at the edge of naming what this is, but it’s like they have personalities, and each of these varying personalities is expressing joy, in one way or another, at one stage of life or the next. Working and understanding these qualities of flowers has been a lifelong passion of mine. I realize now that this energy is what attracted me to flowers as a child. Without words, they speak to me in a language all their own, one of wild abandon and delight in life itself. 

Roses are, to me, the most luxurious and precious flowers I grow. I share their name and carry that lifelong connection to them closely. I am in love with their romance, their sensuality, their soft as silk petals, their intoxicating scent. Yet their woody and thorn-covered stems don’t allow me to mistake their beauty for weakness. For these reasons, for me, roses have become the floral embodiment of feminine grace and beauty.

My approach to floral artistry is natural and intuitive. I love to work with what grows regionally, season by season. I begin my process in the garden, in the cool of the morning. I move through quietly, feeling my sense of separation from nature falling away, slipping into this web of life, blending in my sounds, my breath, my footsteps, feeling into a sensation of oneness with all that surrounds me. I take it all in with every sense at my disposal: the touch of coolness on my skin, the bird song, the dampness of the grass underfoot, the clear scent of morning. And I turn my full attention to what is growing. 

I have some idea, when I step into the garden, of what I’m hoping to create, but an important quality of my process is just staying open. I look at each flower, at each bloom, and from there the rest is pure intuition. What compels me today? Which blooms are just about to open? Where is my eye drawn? The flowers reveal their own preciousness, and often, even, their own ideas about what they want to become. In this way, my relationship with flowers is more like a collaboration, a duet with nature, than that of an artist and her medium.