Treat Yourself to One of These Fabulous Floral Workshops

Snag a bud and head to these floral workshops, where you’ll learn to arrange fragrant blooms over gourmet bites and bubbly

Flower Arranging Workshops
Alys Tomlinson
Written by Dakota Kim February 10, 2020

Make Giftable Floral Creations

Rolling Greens, with three Los Angeles locations in DTLA, Fairfax, and Culver City, is a nursery and home store known for its spacious event facilities, but it also hosts trendy monthly workshops called Learn + Grow. You can learn how to arrange Valentine’s Day flowers and make beauty products in one fell swoop at the Fresh Cut Floral styling class and Organic Lavender Body Scrub workshop. The workshop features seasonal, hand-picked flowers and an all-natural sugar lavender body scrub, and cheese and charcuterie will be served.

Rolling Greens also caters to private groups, offering activities for baby showers and birthdays. Pick from activities like the au courant mounting of staghorn ferns, new classics like succulent arrangements, or a lesson in basic floral styling.

#TreatYoself to a New Design Portfolio Shot

Why can’t a day of flower arrangement double as a day of self-care? The elegant designers at Oakland-based Rust & Flourish see flowers as personal and exploratory, a part of the emotional inner process (their name comes from the Warsan Shire poem “Residue,” invoking “rebirth and growth from ash, from rust, and from dirt,” much like flowers springing up from the ground). So it makes sense that their workshops make you feel like you’re spending an intimate day with your friends, treating yourselves.

For Valentine’s Day, this avant-garde design studio is skipping the red roses and serving up lush greens, anthuriums, and wildflowers. Students will sip champagne, nosh on cake and snacks, and learn the basic elements of floral design, including mechanics, color theory, and placement. Your teacher will guide you through a full tablescape design, using plates, menu cards, candles, goblets, and other props to create a coordinated look. At the end, students will have photographs to use in their portfolios.

Girl Power + Flower Power

Ladybird Poppy in Denver is sticking true to its name, with four fabulous Galentine’s Day classes, including a cocktail workshop, table centerpiece how-to, and a flower crown DIY capped by a tarot reading. Founder Sarah Tedford sources blossoms from local wholesalers and farmers, creating bouquets, boutonnieres, tablescapes, floral cakes, and flower crowns. Tedford also offers a business class on entering the floristry world, lending tips and tricks to aspiring florists, answering their questions, and teaching a small bouquet lesson.

Get Nerdy With Other Floraphiles

Flower School Portland offers basic hobbyist workshops, but its most impressive draw is an assemblage of serious mastery classes. The mastery classes aren’t just brief affairs that you clock in and out of, but rather deep-dive into subjects like “The Mechanics of Floral Design,” “Composition, Scale and Color,” “The Workings of a Flower Shop,” “The Wedding: His & Hers,” and “The Wedding: The Party.”

In the wedding party class, students learn to design a table centerpiece, a garland, and a professional-level floral altar; then, the entire class works with a styled model and a photographer to document their work. The event is capped with a lunch made by Plume pdx‘s in-house chef. Teacher Kailla Platt says the school tends toward locally-grown product, in true Portland style. “It’s really important to us to use as much local product as possible for our classes, like locally-grown peonies and lilac in the spring and dahlias and zinnias in the height of summer.” 

Keep Reading:

The Latest