Belgium and the Netherlands

Our original flower tour, we have organized and led this trip to The Netherlands and Belgium five times. Laura’s father was the Ambassador to the Netherlands and lived in Amsterdam for many years. She conceived the idea for the tour because she wanted to share the amazing European flower experience with her flower friends. While in the Netherlands and Belgium we take flower arranging classes with the instructors on this virtual tour. Their classes are taught in their home studio and charming greenhouses. We tour the tulip fields and beautiful countryside bursting with spring flowers. We spend free time visiting museums and enjoying the canal side of life.  

France

Our tour started in Paris where we visited stylish French flower shops where we took hand tied bouquet lessons with Maison Vertum. We spent two days studying with Frederic Dupre, French champion designer, culminating with decorating in a historic Parisian mansion. We had an insiders tour of the Christian Dior fashion exhibition at the Louvre with floral inspired designs. We traveled to the Lyon area where spent two magical days taking classes with Gudrun Cotteniere and Christiana Gouverneyre using flowers we cut from Christiana’s terraced garden.  Our home base was a 13th century chateau.

Vancouver

What an amazing flower adventure in Hitomi Gilliam’s home world! Hitomi is a world renowned designer, who helped us craft this unique experience that included workshops with Hitomi, Suzanne Law and Brenna Quan. Hitomi led us on garden tours and tours of her hometown. We explored the forests, mountainsides and spectacular views that have so inspired Hitomi’s work. 

Virginia

Flowers, antiques, historic homes and beautiful countryside. What better combination can there be?  We oriented our tour around the Historic Virginia Garden Tour exploring different areas and historic homes of Virginia. We started and ended with the historic cities of Alexandria and Richmond.  We spent an amazing day with Holly Chapple at Hope Farm where we had a hands-on workshop, enjoyed flower demonstrations and toured her farm and got to peek in her famous prop closet. We took flower arranging classes and visited gardens along the way.

England and Ireland

The Chelsea Flower Show was the anchor feature of this tour with its many satellite flower experiences.  We studied with Joseph Massie at the Covent Flower Market. We took a hands on workshop with Judith Blacklock at her school in Knightsbridge. We journeyed into the countryside to see Sissinghurst Castle and Sarah Raven’s garden and take a class with her. For the second half of our tour we were based on a private estate in northwest coastal Ireland. Jenny Murphy came to spend a day teaching us wire techniques. We foraged on the Estate with Gay Barbazon to do natural inspired designs. We ended in Dublin where we toured Helen Dillon’s special home garden.

California

The flower capital of the U.S.! We started with a harbor cruise in Santa Barbara and worked our way up to San Francisco. Our Santa Barbara hotel garden provided us the perfect backdrop for a California design style workshop. We visited Rose Story Farm ending with a sunset wine and cheese in the courtyard. Florabundance’s warehouse in the middle of the flower growing region and neighboring flower farms revealed spectacular blooms. We enjoyed a glorious drive up the coast to Oakland where we took a class with Ron Morgan at a historic club. He also took us to see some of the private gardens hidden behind private walls in the Oakland area.  We finished our trip in San Francisco with Natasha Lisitsa and her team at Waterlily Garden.  She took us to the San Francisco flower market where we selected flowers for hanging feature group projects.  

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