Hello, I am Arianna!

I adore flowers.  They hold an extraordinary power for me as an art form; colors that I can blend and swirl like paint, shapes and textures to mold like clay.  I love the feeling of a new box of stems at the beginning of a project, the excitement of a blank canvas and nature’s most beautiful medium.  I believe that good art is felt deeply, and I have so much appreciation working with an art form that has such movement and is deeply connected to the Earth.  Flowers, like great memories, are not stagnant. They open and close and they reach for the sun, and it is a great pleasure to capture these moments and bring them to life for my clients.

The Seeds

I learned the craft of gardening and arranging from my mother, who treated her plants with the same care and affection as her family.  One of her most impressive accomplishments, and the one that had the biggest impact on me, was our “everlasting” garden patch, a continuously blooming and productive part of the garden that was refreshed with new growth each season.  She mixed annuals and perennial bulbs, planted cover crops to refresh the soil and always took care to recycle valuable seeds. She never used chemical enhancers to defy nature, but worked with it to create a year-round source of food and beauty.  Gardening was not a spring/summer hobby for us, but our way of connecting directly to the natural world and learning how to live with it, not on top of it.

The Roots

After losing our North Carolina island home to a Hurricane in the 90s, my family came back to the bucolic sprawling hills of Buckingham, to my mother’s family farm.  We traded warm weather and sandy beaches for 4 seasons and hay fields, but I soon realized this farm was ideal for reflection. As I got older I became more and more involved in running the property, preparing to one day fill the very large shoes of my grandmother, a pioneer for both female farmers and females in government in her time. I am incredibly lucky today to have inherited this farm, and blessed to be able to raise my own family here, to work the soil and honor my grandparents, my parents, and the Earth they taught me to love.

The Blooms

One day several years ago, a friend of mine got engaged.  I invited her and some friends to the farm for a little celebration, and as we talked and walked around the old barns she stopped at an open horse stall.  Inside I had some fresh clippings from the garden and wreaths that I was creating for the horses.  She asked if I did wedding flowers, and I figured it would be a fun project. One year later I had booked 5 more weddings, and more importantly found my calling. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have found something that is so integral to who I am, that allows me to produce beauty in the world create moments of deep joy for some truly wonderful people.