Still-Life with Flowers and Grapes

FlowersSustainablilityWine CountryHolidaysGarden

Nov 20

Still Life with Flowers and Grapes launch my floral design business and inspired my garden blogging.

I am excited to share my adventures in gardening, floral design, and the beauty of the Northern California wine country with my new blog, Flowers and Grapes. My floral arrangement pictured above in a repurposed rustic urn, abundantly filled with seasonal homegrown flowers, vegetables and locally grown grapes is like a still-life reflecting my many interests in gardening, floral design, sustainability, and regional flavor. This abundant urn is also a metaphor for my hopes and dreams for continued bounty in my garden and in friendship, love, and life. Flowers and Grapes will be a platform to share my creativity, sense of whimsy, and celebrations of the seasons.

As an artful self-taught suburban gardener, living in a small house on the edge of open space in the Lucas Valley Watershed in Northern Marin, I hope that visitors will see how easy gardening and flower growing can be and also how it enriches daily life. I hope visitors will learn that our suburban yards are extensions and connectors to the ecosystems that support life and also understand importance of living in a sustainable world. In 2012, I created this floral arrangement for my first client when I launched Today’s Bouquet, a boutique sustainable floral design business with organic heirloom flowers grown from my garden—pictured in the gallery below.

As my business grew with a retail channel called Pop-up Flower Shop by Today’s Bouquet, I began sourcing flowers from sustainable flower farmers in the wine country and Bay Area. Today’s Bouquet was an early leader in our local Slow Flower field to vase movement utilizing for floral design locally and U.S. grown flowers instead of commercially grown flowers which have greater negative environmental impacts. My business also inspired my first garden blog, connecting me to an incredible community of gardeners, food and flower growers, floral designers and stylists, and of course, my beloved garden writers who continue to inspire me.

In 2015, our region was faced with a terrible drought which forced me to pivot to a new career in education technology, expanding opportunities in innovation and education for public schools. Currently, I am consulting in Tech Ed and am an independent new media curator in XR: Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and 360 Immersive Story Telling. I enjoy leveraging these experiential technologies to engage audiences in new media art and STEAM [science, technology, engineering, art and science].

My garden is a refuge from my daily tech life, and connects me to nature and communities of like minds in gardening throughout the world and in the online universe.

2020 brought Covid-19 and a global pandemic, resulting in an unexpected furlough from my work when public schools closed and went online. Many of my innovative programs in XR have been tabled indefinitely. Sheltering in place afforded me more time in my garden with my beautiful flowers, and also provided an opportunity to reconnect with my garden, writing, and floral communities.

As an unemployed, socially isolated empty nester since March, I found myself on social media connecting with many more online communities in flowers and gardening -- even a garden community in virtual reality! I also became quite obsessed with topiaries by following the Master Topiarist, @the_hedge_barber , on Instagram. With a surprise gift from my fabulous husband of an electric hedge trimmer, I began perfecting the shapes of shrubs in my garden. Many online friends encouraged me to continue to share my gardening and flowering endeavors. So I've created Flower and Grapes to be a new blog expanding my personal Instagram and to be an outlet for my gardening and creativity. I planned to launch Flowers and Grapes this

I discovered this rustic monument thanking the heroic firefighters that continue to battle the fires this season in Sonoma along the 121 highway just east of Cornerstone Gardens.

summer when my garden hit its full stride. However, its launch was unexpectedly delayed because of raging wildfires that consumed many areas in and around the wine country until finally extinguished this Fall.

Flowers and Grapes celebrates everything I love and learn each day in my garden and in Northern California — the wonderful place I call home for over 20 years. I am also excited to share with you the beauty and flavor of the the wine country region including the few vineyards in my region of northern Marin. I look forward to your comments and suggestions to make this a resource for all levels of gardeners and visitors to the wine country. Celebrate gardening and the seasons with me. I can’t wait for you to join me on my adventures in all things Flowers and Grapes!