Did you know that the flowers for sale at the grocery store or at a conventional florist likely travelled thousands of miles to reach us here in Central New York?

Millions of flowers are flown around the world everyday, originating in California, or Colombia, or Ecuador, or Holland, or Italy… These flowers are almost always grown with intensive chemical inputs, at great expense to the land and labor that produced them — not to mention their carbon footprint.

Aligning with the slow flower paradigm means foregoing tulips in November and roses in February, and it means embracing, in great big leaping gulps, the incredible flowers that are available to us right here, right now.

On Sunday, June 25th, we’ll gather at the Yoga Shala in Clinton for a workshop that celebrates the best early summer flowers. Nat will guide students as they make a lush, layered, and wild centerpiece-style arrangement using flowers sourced from local farms.

Instead of using toxic floral foam, we will use chicken wire and tape as the mechanics to hold our arrangements in place. We will create arrangements based off a flower recipe that students can take home to use as inspiration for their own work.

We will look at how flowers grow in nature and the paintings of the Dutch Masters, but mostly, we will let our instincts and intuition guide us just as much as our eyes when choosing how to pair colors and textures and create form. Students will be able to keep the vase!

Email info@localfoodsmohawkvalley.com to register.