Have you ever held onto something because getting rid of it felt like letting go of the person, the day, or the memory attached to it?
That's what I think about every time someone hands me flowers to preserve.
Sometimes they're wedding flowers from one of the happiest days of someone's life. Sometimes they're flowers from a funeral, and they're connected to one of the hardest.
Either way, I never forget that what I'm being trusted with isn't just flowers.
It's a memory.
There's something incredibly personal about preservation work that I don't think I fully understood when I first started doing it. Someone is handing me something they can't replace and trusting me to turn it into something they'll hopefully have for the rest of their life.
I feel that responsibility every single time.
And honestly, it's one of the greatest honours of what I do.
I love hearing the stories behind the flowers. Who carried them. Who chose them. Why a certain flower matters. Whose garden they came from. Why someone couldn't bring themselves to throw them away.
Those stories change how I see the piece I'm making.
I'm not just deciding where a flower looks best in resin. I'm thinking about how someone is going to feel when they see it five, ten, twenty years from now.
I especially feel this with memorial pieces.
Grief is such a strange thing. We look for little ways to keep people close. A photograph. A voicemail we can't delete. A piece of clothing that still smells like them. Flowers from their service sitting on the kitchen counter because throwing them away feels impossible.
Being trusted with those flowers is something I don't take lightly.
Then there are wedding pieces, which carry a completely different kind of emotion.
I love the idea that flowers that would normally last a week can become part of someone's home. Maybe one day their kids will ask about them and hear the story of their wedding.
That's pretty amazing.
And because every bouquet and every story is different, every preservation piece should be different too.
That's probably my favourite part.
What would you keep forever if you could?
For me, preservation isn't really about saving flowers.
It's about giving a memory somewhere beautiful to live.