A Little Catch Up, Part 1

Autumn Reflections & Updates

Everyone says it, but it’s truer every year: time flies by! The summer energized me, had me feeling ambitious and generative. I felt an urgency to get as much done as I could. Now I’m feeling the fall season within me, a molasses-like resistance, anxious paralysis, and depletion—despite that ever-present urgency needling me.

If you’re feeling this way too, I hope you’re finding moments of peace, of savoring the season even in small ways, finding the final blooms or color of the season.

After getting my bearings a bit, I wanted to return with a few reflections and updates.

Reflection On the Bountiful Centerpiece

It feels like ages ago, but back in September I put together a floral design workshop, the Bountiful Centerpiece. In this workshop, my aim was to guide folks through a centerpiece design using fall flowers in a season synonymous with harvest, bounty, and abundance. There is a profusion of lushness and color to fall flowers. Vibrant hues of the summertime mingle with the moodier, richer colors often tied to fall like burgundy and amber.

A few shots from the floral design workshop, The Bountiful Centerpiece.

Regardless of the shape or symmetry of a vase, you can create a floral design that can sit at the center of a dining table and maintain visual balance—all without obstructing anyone’s view or reach. In fact, the vessel you choose informs how you engineer your design and the very look of it. It’s a fun, creative challenge to look at a container and imagine how it can hold the expression of a season’s natural beauty. It’s something I find myself reflecting on often.

How can this hold my connection to—my imagining and tactile understanding of—nature?

Another way of saying it: how can I tell the story of these blooms? Of these leaves and mosses and branches? Their individual and fleeting aliveness deserves a striking composition, a design to honor them. It’s another moment where writing and flowers meet: how we choose to contain these elements of nature or language is paramount to the finished work. A holiday garland of dark green magnolia and cedar draped over a doorway feels like the unfurling of an official scroll, a jubilant proclamation, whereas a bud vase of diminutive blooms and buds on a bedside feels like a tender poem or lullaby.  

In the case of the centerpiece, it feels like an echo of oral tradition. Let’s gather ‘round our table, enjoy the sensory feast before us, share it with those close to us. We can tell our stories from the seasons. We can share our joys, despair, and fears. Let’s be comforted and dazzled by it together. Framing it this way, I go back (always going back) to the proverbial campfire, gathering around for good company and a good story.

With holidays fast approaching, it’s fitting to consider the centerpiece, especially in such uncertain and fraught times. Flowers have a way of tapping into deep-rooted emotions, of memories both fond and bittersweet. Arranging them and offering them to the table is a lovely gesture of camaraderie, an expression of our connection to the land and each other. To borrow from poet Mary Oliver, flowers offer the world “to your imagination, call to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—over and over announcing your place,” (our place), “in the family of things.”

A Thanksgiving centerpiece I made a few years ago. The fall season makes room to combine bright, summery colors like oranges, pinks, butter yellows, and apricots with dark cinnamon red and burgundy.

An Update on Writing

This year has been marked by its changes, both sweeping tectonic shifts and quieter reminders that things are no longer how they once were. One of those changes is getting a new writing job!

Last month I started writing for the gardening resource, Epic Gardening. As with any new job, there’s a period of acclimating or finding your sea legs, which is exactly where I am. Despite the discomfort and growing pains of doing something new, it’s exciting to write for a brand that shares a desire to help people learn more about the natural world. I’m hopeful I can offer my connection with flowers.

My first article was published recently, 7 Mushrooms You Can Grow on Your Countertop. The timing of writing a piece on mushrooms feels appropriate; my fungi fascination has only been reinforced by something my boss, Jenn Pineau of Nature Composed, mentioned.

Early on in working for Jenn, she mentioned that if you need to feel hopeful, look to mushrooms. Whether you’re looking for a more holistic approach to your health or you want to learn about innovations to counter climate change, the mushroom’s potential seems like a new frontier. I’ve carried that sentiment with me since Jenn told me and I included it in this article (thank you, Jenn!). If you’re curious, I’d love for you to give it a read. Here’s to hope sprouting up in unexpected and dark places.

A collection of mushrooms sprouting across the street from Nature Composed.

Thank you for reading and the continued support, it means the world! Consider subscribing and sharing this with someone who needs more flowers in their life. Until next time!