About

For most of my working life I felt that my practice was encumbered by something I could not see, an untouchable hand I sensed at the design bench but had no name for. In the summer of 2025 I read a short manifesto called Revelation, written about professional life in general, and it showed me another way to understand my own. I still cannot fully say why it moved me as deeply as it did, or why it still does, but I know it changed my perspective, and the questions on this site are what grew from that change.

The change reached back across about forty years in the trade. Before I founded Studio Herbage Florist in 2014, I had worked at the design bench for retail florists and for wholesale florists, produced events, and spent years in the mass market, designing and managing for an international bouquet manufacturer and, in a separate role, managing national retail accounts and their teams of merchandisers. Once I had words for the hand I had felt in my own work, I began to recognize it in the working lives of practitioners in every part of the trade I had known, and that recognition is why I write to the field as a whole.

I write here for practitioners and for the educators and institutions that form and represent them. A single reading gave me words for something I had carried for decades, and I hope some of what I write here can do the same for practitioners who are carrying it now, and leave them better able to act on it. Each run of pieces takes up one open question about the practice and stays with it until the thinking is done, which might take two pieces or six. Most are essays I write alone, and some are conversations with people from other disciplines who can see things in our practice that we have stopped noticing.

Today I own and lead Studio Herbage Florist, with studios in Johnstown and Malta, New York. I hold the AIFD and CFD designations, I have written for SAF’s Floral Management, and I founded FloristFacts.org, an independent editorial and research platform for the industry. I am also at work on a book about American floristry and professional formation.

If you are working on these questions from inside a shop or from one of the trade’s institutions, I would like to hear from you. Subscribe to receive new writing by email, and reply to any of it; your reply comes straight to me.