Family Bouquet
The wildflower garden behind my childhood home was one of my mom's most sacred places. I often caught her deep in thought, standing at the top of the hill as she watered the flowers below. During the hottest times of day, you could find her transplanting plants or pulling weeds — even if she had to be out the door in ten minutes. Every bloom felt like a little promise to her, and it wasn't uncommon to receive a text out of the blue of her new buds that had made an appearance that day.
Her garden was beautiful, but there was really never a true design plan. It was, in every sense, a wildflower garden: nurtured and loved, chaotic and untamed — a labor of love, as she often said.
My mom taught me a lot about God's promises through that garden. As kids, if she ever heard us say we were bored, her response would be, "lets go pick some weeds in the garden." Very, very rarely would I actually go join her. But when I did, I'd watch her clip the heads off faded blooms and carefully open them up to display how one dead flower could hold hundreds of seeds. She would save those seeds for the next year's garden while also handing envelopes full of them to just about everyone who came to our house.
"Flowers speak for God: 'I love you.'"
That was one of her Instagram captions — a post I found shortly after she passed away, and I've never been able to let those words go.
As I found myself sitting down to paint over the last couple years, flowers were all that came to mind. In all their beauty and glory, every seed came from a flower that had already lived through its season. I felt stuck in my grief, but painting seemed to give my thoughts somewhere to go. One day I pulled out the largest sheet of watercolor paper I had, and without a sketch or any plan, began painting. What first felt like random colors filling the page slowly transformed into an unexpected wildflower garden.
It was beautiful — chaotic and untamed. My labor of love. My display of grief.
As I stepped back, I realized I wasn't looking at just any wildflower garden. It wasn't the one behind my childhood home, the one I can picture my mom in so clearly, but rather the garden that now blooms behind my dad's new house — grown from the very seeds my mom had saved and shared with us.
I began to create paintings for close friends that reflected their families through their favorite flowers. Over time, those paintings became "Family Bouquets" — arrangements made from birth month flowers that celebrate the people who make you, you.
Flowers speak for God: “I love you”. With that thought in mind, how beautiful it is to see your family in bloom. Every family has its own garden, every life leaves seeds behind, and every bouquet tells a story worth remembering.
As an artist, we create with inspiration and intention. But the moment we give our art away, we also surrender our intentions to someone else's story. This is my story behind every flower I paint, but the beauty in art is you get to take what I’ve created and see it through your own eyes, shaped by your own story. What these flowers mean to me may be entirely different from what they come to mean to you — and that, to me, is the beautiful thing about art.