Transforming a Garage into a Creative Haven for Art and Flowers

People always say that renovations take longer than you expect, but I can’t help feeling impatient to get this creative space up and running. So much anticipation, planning and elbow grease has gone into turning this vision into an actual physical space.

For the past six months, my partner and I have been working on transforming one end of our garage into a pottery studio and storefront where I can host workshops, greet customers, showcase my artwork and very importantly, keep my cut flowers cool. Building this business and creating this studio space has been like pulling on the threads of a dream to weave together a little nest that can act like an incubator for all my creative projects.

**‘Herbarium’ is the name of my business**

It’s a flower farm offering seasonal cut flowers, bouquet subscriptions, event florals, dye plants, bouquet preservation and garden design services.

When our little garage-turned-gallery opens up, it will be a place for customers to come pick up their fresh flowers — but it will also be the space where I create my body of work as a multidisciplinary artist, working mainly with clay but also natural dyes, textiles, painting and printmaking. Herbarium exists at the intersection of art and horticulture and is the meeting place of two of my biggest passions in life: creative design and growing plants.

A huge piece of the motivation that drives this small business is my desire to build community and to share the ways in which art and plants can enrich our lives. From cut flowers brightening up a home or workspace to witnessing the magic of plants changing the colour of cloth through natural dye processes, there are so many opportunities to connect with nature and other people through art and horticulture. Herbarium is the way that I get to share that excitement and passion with my community.

I have a nontraditional approach to floristry in that I have no training as a florist. Instead, I approach floral design through the lens of an artist and gardener. I work exclusively with locally grown flowers, mainly those I have grown myself, using flowers as a tool to celebrate the beauty of the changing season. However, unlike my other artworks, these floral creations are ephemeral — they are alive and changeable and perishable just like nature.

My hope is that my floral designs make people feel connected to seasonality and connected to the gardens and gardeners in their lives. Flowers have this incredible ability to connect us to our memories, to our ancestors and to the places we have been.

One of the most rewarding comments for me as a farmer/florist is when someone tells me that my flowers remind them of their mother or aunt or grandmother. It feels like important work, growing these plants, knowing that generations of gardeners and land stewards before me have cared for this place where I farm and the variety of plants that I cultivate. My small part in growing these crops is just a single stitch in a large blanket that stretches over many gardens and generations.

Herbarium is an eclectic endeavour, it’s multifaceted and adaptable. To be honest, I’m still figuring out exactly which products and services we will offer in the long run, but of all the services that we currently offer, one really has a particular place of pride for me and that is bouquet preservation.

This service feels extra special for a couple of reasons. First, it is often wedding flowers that I am preserving: I feel so honoured when people trust me with the flowers from one of the most important days of their lives. But there is another reason why bouquet preservation is significant to me — and that’s about my process.

Writing about my process takes me back to my early days as a gardener. When I was studying horticulture at Red River College in Winnipeg (2007-2010), my graduating work was creating a herbarium for the college. A herbarium is a collection of pressed plants, but also the name for a single pressed plant specimen that has been mounted and labeled. These specimens are generally used for educational or identification purposes. The technique of pressing plants to preserve them is the same method I now use to preserve bouquets and it is so close to my heart that I chose it as the namesake of my business.

For me, one of the most exciting things about building my home studio is that until now, I have almost always worked in community studios. While that has been formative to my development as an artist and I cherish these experiences tremendously, I am proud to have reached a place in my life where my little family has the space and means to support this home studio dream. It is such an exciting time for me, being at the beginning of this new chapter in my artistic journey: I am about to have more physical and mental space to devote to my creative practice then I have ever had before. The potential for cross-pollination has never felt more potent and I just can't wait to see how my work in floral design informs my artwork and how each evolve as I spend more time honing my craft.