Hello and welcome to my first post for the Bunches & Blooms blog! I'm your host, Rachel Heath and I look forward to continuing on this journey together.
To bring you up to speed with who I am, I am a professional floral designer in Washington State, where I live with my husband and daughter. Before flowers the majority of my career was spent in marketing and event coordination. I also worked as a children's book specialist for 6 years at the greatest independent bookshop in the country, The King's English Bookshop. My Bachelors degree in Humanities is fairly irrelevant to both.
I grew up watching my mom and dad love gardening. My dad has a green thumb for fruits and vegetables. My mom has a love for flowers blooming in her yard, a trait she inherited from her own father. So my love for plants stems from my own family roots. (See what I did there?) I grew up loving to plot out my mom's flower beds with her. So you may just see a few posts on here about gardening and plants, in addition to flower arranging. We'll see how it goes.
Anyway, I didn't try my hand at cut foliage and blooms until I bought a beginners’ class for floral design on Groupon. That's right. Groupon. I talked my sister-in-law into doing it with me and so together we went and there I was introduced to this oh-so-magical world of floral care and design. I've been hooked ever since.
From there I began going to my favorite, independent grocery chain for a somewhat wide selection, (for a grocery store), of blooms and greens. I had two sisters in high school who did a lot of theater, and with each performance I reveled in the opportunity to pick out and rearrange a bouquet for them to what I thought would be their liking. Bells of Ireland. Gladiolus. Bunches of wax flower. Purple mini callas—I can still remember the flowers I chose to give them for each performance.
Skipping ahead I rearranged the direction of my career and centered it instead on flowers. For as much fun and play as it was back then and continues to be now, the reality of the workload and cost of flowers keeps me grounded from spending my family's entire grocery budget for the month on the prettiest, seasonal blooms at the market. Instead I focus my services outward, to share my passion for the colors, textures, and glories that I find in flowers with all of you.
I'm excited to invite you along via these written words, as I continue in my efforts to bring the beauty of nature into both our most memorable and ordinary of days.
Above are my very first arrangements from my first-ever class: a vase of dendrobium orchids and oriental lilies and a paint can of roses and peony leaves.