With our upcoming Japanese Virtual Flower Festival quickly approaching, we wanted to share a little bit more about each of the educators who will be showcasing our fabulous Japanese products!
Haven't heard about our Japanese Flower Showcase yet? Check out the details & schedule below for our January 18th event, and be sure to add it to your calendar so you can join in and educate yourself on this exquisite product!
Studio Mondine is a floral design team based in San Francisco, California united by an insatiable curiosity of the natural world. Our first book, Ikebana Unbound, was released in 2020 with publisher Artisan Books and features 32 flower arrangement projects written for the home designer. We continue our writing and teaching through a partnership with the creative education experts at If I Made, for budding florists of all levels. Astute students of flowers will notice the influences of Constance Spry and Sofu Teshigahara in our work-- Spry for her effusive use of overlooked materials, and Teshigahara for his reinvention of form, time and time again. Both held that flowers should be for everyone-- a belief we maintain as well.Especially through the Winter months, Japanese flowers are incredible to behold. With a diversity of flowers offering nuanced colors and undertones, to their exceptional stem length and vase life, it's evident how much care goes into their cultivation. With the utmost reverence for the materials and the craft, we honor the traditions of Japanese flower cultivation and Japanese flower arranging in our work.
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Amy Balsters is a classically trained, award-winning floral designer and educator with vast industry experience spanning two decades in retail floristry, weddings, and special events. She specializes in teaching romantic-inspired, artful floral designs using foundational design techniques. Amy has taught thousands of designers across the U.S and her signature course, Bouquet Bootcamp™️, has helped over 500 designers transform their bouquet techniques. With an honest, empathetic, and holistic approach, she Is passionate about helping floral designers gain confidence and clarity to achieve their design goals.
I am thrilled to be showcasing a handful of designs that highlight Japanese flowers. Their longevity, size, colors, and varieties are so unique to the floral industry. Their durability and often very long stem length allow for such variety in designing, I am looking forward to sharing how I highlight this type of product in my designs.
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David Dahlson was raised in London, England, and graduated from the Central School of Art & Design, University of London with a Bachelor's degree in Fine Art Painting. After college, he moved to Los Angeles, CA, where he worked in a studio designing titles for the movie industry. After one year of this, he resigned from the tedium to seek a career in music. Electing to do a variety of jobs to pay the bills, he found a night job working on the Los Angeles Flower Market for Growers/Mt Eden washing buckets and wrapping flowers for $3.50 an hour. While the pay was less than scintillating, David was drawn to the flower business for its combination of art and industry and moved into sales. He was eventually recruited to join Mayesh by his cousin Patrick and has worked at Mayesh for the last 40 years, with a few forays into Punk Rock, fashion design and growing flowers along the way.
David has worked in every facet of the flower industry, and over the years has come to have a profound appreciation for flowers, a deep respect for the growers and their extraordinary daily achievements, and an empathy for the inspiring work of designers and florists. In a quest to bring new products to the Mayesh clientele he has traveled the world and the USA to locate growers and flowers.
In 1987, David made his first visit to Japan at the invitation of Yoko Sakamoto of YMS, Osaka, one of the top flower importers in Japan. He was fascinated by the Japanese approach to growing flowers. Most of the farms are quite small, and in general, each grower focuses on just one product, becoming profoundly invested and knowledgeable in that product. David was deeply impressed by the quality he encountered but was struck by the attention to the aesthetic characteristics of each flower, a fact that is often overlooked in Western floriculture. In April 2002, David was invited back to Japan to speak at the YMS grower summit in Japan, to talk about the US flower industry, touching on a range of topics from the Nisei in California, the changes in the US flower industry over the years, and the effects caused by the devastation of 9/11.
Back then, it was inconceivable that we would have the luxury of enjoying the incredible flowers from Japan, but as with many things in life that situation has changed, and David believes that we are richer for it.