The Possibility Is Enough
Earlier this month, I went to New York City for 24 hours.
It was, by every practical measure, an unnecessary trip.
Last August, I spent a week in London attending a workshop with AESME STUDIO. In the last year, Ally and Jess released their new book, Naturalistic Flowers: A Year of Plants, Places, and People. I have been following the evolution of their studio with particular interest. Since I met them, they have reimagined themselves as AESME STUDIO & SCHOOL OF FLOWERS—a name that felt less like a rebrand and more like a declaration. I wanted to hear more about what it meant to claim that identity so fully.
The local NYC florist hosting the evening soirée and morning workshop was Taylor of Fox Fodder Flowers, whose work has offered endless inspiration. I knew they had once had a brick-and-mortar shop and had since moved toward a different kind of practice, one shaped more by studio work and an online presence. I wanted to understand that decision, too. What happens when you let the business you've built become something else?
And I suspected that if they were creating the container for the evening, those who would attend might be cut from the same cloth: folks making choices I found interesting and carving out their own space in the industry.
I was especially curious about Alex of Field Studies Flora, whose work is rooted so specifically in locality. I've long admired the clarity of her point of view and wanted to understand what happens when you commit so fully to a particular place. There is something intriguing about a point of view so narrow that it becomes expansive by allowing a constraint to become the basis of your language.
These were the questions I was carrying with me, along with my trusty backpack, on the earliest flight out from LAX to JFK, landing just in time to make it to the 6 p.m. event in Manhattan.
Of course, there was another option. I could have stayed in Los Angeles and made some money at a freelance job where I could predict exactly what the day would look like and how I would feel after—always wondering ‘what if’. Instead, I spent a lot of energy to go somewhere with no particular outcome attached to it. I just knew I had a few people I hoped to see, a few questions I wanted to ask, and a (scoliosis) hunch that the room might be worth entering.
Guess what? It was.
The conversations I had with these women, each in their own way, stretched the edges of my imagination. Ally and Jess had taken a name and made it mean something bigger. Taylor had let an established business become something else. Alex had taken locality and made it not just a sourcing practice, but a point of view.
Not because they had figured out some secret formula, but because they had each made choices that seemed to ask: What if our floral practice could be entirely our own?
This was the lesson I took home from London a year ago, and New York gave it another dimension with three working examples of bringing specificity to life.
It's easy to measure progress by what can be counted: money earned, jobs booked, arrangements made. But time and time again, I find the more meaningful shifts are harder to quantify. Sometimes the possibility is enough.
