Did you see Nicolette and I in T Magazine this weekend? I think it's funny because we look like we're stealing the flowers.

Our blue palette class on May 7th still has some spots available...highly recommend. Flowers have been just so damn good as of late...I was practicing this evening a bit.

light a candle

raise your hands up, clasp them and start ringing them

cause kids, the ranunculus is done finished

caput!

finito!

sorry suckas! you wanna see more ranunculus?

ain't gonna happen. we can't always get what we want

i'd like to see more elizabeth taylor, but that there is life

all cycling and shit

and I'm fine with it

see you suckas! we'll be moving on up to peonies, clematis, garden roses, dahlias

not looking back

grazing greener pastures

you're chance to win the last in the studio

comment

we've been way up in central ny on a wild sheep's chase

now we've settled in with my folks to have easter dinner. above are some snaps of a centerpiece i just made from my mom's garden. her magnolia has just bloomed. we spent the day planting some new things; foam flower, heucheras, epimediums - all deer resistant, shade loving perennials; bless them. the ponds along our familiar hiking routes are thawed and the sweet perfume of these magnolia blossoms in the house is loosing battle to the smell of a certain wet dog who has been lurking about hoping for lamb scraps.

it's nice to take a break from the city

i type this to you painfully on my father's PC

enter the vortex!

These ranunculus remind me of black holes, and all my weekends spent on the event horizon. Get it?
No? Well, It's free flower time and you don't have to be a physicist* to win these crazy kids. Just comment for a chance.

*Actually - I've been thinking and reading a lot of physics this year and I'd love to do a barter with someone who actually knows a lot about physics so I can ask all the questions I have. Wouldn't that be neat, information for flowers?

World of Inferiors

I came home last Monday from two big installations; exhausted - hungry, with an afternoon alone in the apartment (!) a half eaten block of manchego and Babs and Barry on the record player. Let me tell you this right now; there is no better music to arrange flowers to than Barbara Streisand. You can argue this with me, but I like to think I know what I'm talking about. I got this down.

I had left-over flowers. A fuck ton of them. And so things started getting interesting, scarves strewn, ribbon unraveled. Dresses tried on then discarded in heaps on the floor. Petals dropping, dogs sighing. Remember I told you I've been trying to practice everyday..

This was all fine and dandy until the sun set and I realized the magnitude of what had happened; the mess was epic. As I began to tidy up, I kept finding more and more cleaning to do. And then I went deep.

To get the record straight - to give you a fair idea - I must admit that I have not really cleaned my apartment in 2011. Sure, the occasional swiff. The midweek dusting of the coffee table for cocktail hour. But a deep clean doesn't happen around here. I got other shit to do. Cleaning is for sissies. Like umbrellas.

But Monday I was on a tear. The sort that happens when you have been running on so much adrenalin and momentum that when it comes time to rest, to take some time off - you simply don't know how. Can't stop. Won't stop.

And that is how I found myself on the floor, behind the refrigerator scrubbing moldings. At some point I misplaced my rag and started using the bottom portion of my T-shirt. I became a human mop - a spitting, scrubbing, writhing mess on the linoleum. I had succumbed, slipped down the emotionally charged rabbit hole and entered the void: women's work.

Alarmed and disgusted at myself (who am I? why can't I relax?) I put on hiatus plans to clean the oven, to dust under the bed, to clean all the windows.
I have a pattern of working myself into the ground and then feeling exasperated. When I start to feel bad for myself, Eric does this thing where he puts his pointer fingers and thumbs together and pretends to play the tiniest violin. The saddest music in the world. It's a hilarious (sometimes) reminder that feeling sorry for myself gets me absolutely no where. And it's unattractive. So there it is. Dear Diary - I'm working on being less of a perfectionist and learning how better to relax in my free time. Which is why I just gave myself a manicure - a reversed french one...
Real women's work.

something for you this monday morning

saipua update + free flower friday

morning kittens! shit is starting to percolate around here
got wedding season brimming

got our first van rental of the season (always a sign of something serious)
got a fantastic crew in place, got annie lennox on repeat
got a new killer dress from caitlin
got hellebores to hoard, got watercolor pansies, begonias galore
got flowers in front of jay-z gwenyth and martha this week
got joelle coming out to freelance and make a million arrangements an hour and bring us pistachio merenges and lavender butter cookies
got a big spring fling extravaganza in the works for May Day weekend (please consider saving dates 4.30 and 5.1)

and got a free flower arrangement with your name on it tomorrow. comment to win
remember WE LOVE YOU!

in the garden of good and evil

I had to go twice to the magnolia grove at the brooklyn botanical garden this past week, for several reasons not worth mentioning. Once with my camera once without.

Both days were gloomy - cold, loamy types of spring days. Been lots of talk around these parts about spring not springing this year. I snicker; this is my kind of spring. The kind of spring that takes the time to do it right. This is a cold spring that slowy unfurls and demands distinct attention HARK! the latency of nature's majesty revealed in languid tones. A metronome. A distant GONG! reverberating with the slow swelling we know so well from time lapse nature films. Something is happening.

70 degree days - STAY AWAY!

I figure it's time well taken, and there is a lesson in all this for me. I can learn to appreciate slow things, things that progress with pace. Another drizzly 50 degree day is another day we get to observe the phenomenon. Like doctors behind glass in an theatre, as city-dwellers we tend to observe spring with cannon's and macro lenses at the helm.

It pained me, but I left my camera home the second time around to the magnolia grove. I didn't want to miss seeing the spectacle with my own eyes. We tend to always want to capture nature. Bag it! Blog it! Make a souvenir of it, make it our own...

But a funny thing I've come to realize about nature is that you can't always take it with you.

hotter than a middle eastern climate..

a little photo sesh i forgot about with these local hellebores that I have been obsessed with and yellow tights which make me look sort of jaundiced but i'm into them anyway

are you going to have a good weekend or what? we'll be working like slaves and loving every minute. happy birthday BANANA!!!

Thursday Update

I have to run out the door to go pick up a few hundred lavender plants for a wedding this weekend, but wanted to let you in on some goings on around here...

1. Had dinner with Nicolette and the famed Emily Thompson last night. Amazing. I feel very happy and lucky this morning to have made a new friend. We talked and talked about flowers, the industry, clients, challenges, successes, money....

2. We have a new intern, Suset, who is killer, and whose enthusiasm is unmatched. She suggested she sleep overnight in the studio so she could get to work first thing in the morning. I really like her.

3. We have a ton of juicy spring material kicking around right now including single petaled white cherry, california poppies, gypsy hyacinth, local ranunculus, mums (i said it), fritillaria, etc and we'll be around through the weekend selling it if you want to come by.

4.. Free flower friday has got to be a pick-up this week, do you mind? We're a bit busy with a big wedding this Sunday and I want to keep everyone close to the studio. I throw in a bar of soap for you too...

Hope all is well out there with you and yours -

[above a bridal bouquet from a few weeks ago with spiraea thunbergii, ranunculus, lilac, sweet peas, cherry blossoms, freesia, etc]

I'm just a big ball of hate this morning sugar heads, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that our new luxury suv driving neighbors are taking chain saws to every fucking tree in the back of our building. I started crying, thinking about all the birds that won't be able to find the trees they usually land in.

Eric, ever the moral compass of reason, said to me; "Sarah maybe they want to plant a vegetable garden and need the sunlight."

Then I'll set their fucking garden on fire! I said.

Haha kidding I didn't say that. I shut up about it and started emotionally eating blueberry muffins instead.

ruminant ramble

Gouda-evening.

It's monday night. The night I have to myself - or as a friend recently put it - the night i tie scarves on my wrists and ankles and dance around to fleetwood mac. In reality; the night I snack on cheese all night and drink wine and try on all my jewelry at once and smoke a single cigarette...all alone.

Well, there it is.

I've been haunted this past week by Sweetgrass, a film by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash about the last great american sheep drive through the highlands of Montana. Seen it? I can't stop thinking about it...

I listened to a podcast of Lucien talking about his experience trailing the herders for a summer in the mountains. He talked a bit about the giant pyrenees mountain dogs that live amidst the herd and will fight to the death when wolves or bears come around looking to eat a sheep. Curiously, in the movie you see the dogs one evening devouring something that looks a lot like a lamb...

Lucien explained that although the dogs are often starving (only so much kibble can be brought in to replenish the cowboy's supplies) they would never kill a sheep. But! as soon as a sheep is dead - they tear into it. Like white on rice. I find this so fascinating.

Also want to tell you the pyrenees mountain dogs are thick as bricks. Very different from the working collies that rally and round up the sheep.

Also also want to tell you that apparently sheep farming has been declining in the US for decades. Americans simply don't eat lamb and don't wear wool. (In fact last night Eric and I fashioned a pizza with lamb sausage, carmelized onions and ricotta. I would say it was the best pizza we have ever made. A welcome break from our mostly vegetarian regimen which is boring, but important to me. Sadly most lamb you find in groceries comes all the way from New Zealand, where sheep farming is part of the national identity.)

Also want to tell you that Lucien said that sheep farming is the one of the few industries that has not been vertically integrated into the modern farming system - that is to say that sheep can't be brought up in feed lots.

I really want to have a sheep farm someday. or next year.

Hellebores, right?!?

Crazy fuckers just keep getting better - three varieties in this special arrangement delivered uptown today. Have a great weekend. I'll be blowing my nose and preparing our new series of classes over the the Little Flower School...