LA Flower Mart

Anna and I started a floral design business last year called Little Edens (www.littleedens.com). My first idea was to do small space garden design business (many thanks to my dear friend Albert who said, oh, small gardens, you mean like a little Eden?) but when Anna came home from a year overseas, she took it in a bit of a different direction. My girl is fascinated with weddings.

Our partnership has been so enjoyable, and one of the best things is that Anna sees things for the most part through the same glasses as me, so our sense of humor is pretty similar (actually, my whole family has pretty much the same humor).

Anna is 26, so she is in the thick of the young marriage crowd. It's like shooting fish in a barrel, there are so many potential brides in her circle. So, we booked our first wedding. It's at a fancy wedding-esque venue up in chi chi Westlake Village, CA. Wonderful!

We were super excited ~ we got our business license, wholesale license, website and business cards. Then we found out we needed "candle insurance". Candle insurance. Right. We got right on that (we did!). So once we were legit and insured, it was time to go to the LA wholesale flower mart and buy our flowers. We had a plan, we had a budget, we had some nerve.

As my friend Chris likes to say about Anna, she is easily distracted (as he says "oh look! Anna sees something shiny!"), and I am just a dingbat to begin with, so you put us two avid gardeners in the middle of one of the most amazing, colorful, vibrant, awe inspiring, stunning locations on the planet at 6:00 a.m. without coffee, and trouble is bound to ensue.

That first time we went to the flower mart, we spent about $75 dollars on 3 bunches of purple statice, 1 dozen pink roses, 1 dozen orange roses, 1 bunch yellow solidaster,  10 red Gerbera daisies, one bunch curly willow, 1 bunch of leather fern, 2 bunches of salal, 1 bunch sunflowers, some Queen Anne's Lace, and.....if you have no idea what I'm talking about, it's like being a kid in a candy store and buying York peppermint patties, orange circus peanuts, cotton candy, malt balls, Butterfingers and wax lips and trying to make them into a cohesive dessert. It's all good, no doubt, but kind of hard to bring together into a pleasing olio.

Fortunately, this was a trial run for us, so we made lots of small and fun arrangements (that required no insurance) and gave them to friends and family. After about a half a dozen weddings and numerous baby/shower/holiday arrangements we are now old pros and can actually walk into the flower mart and leave with exactly what we came for... and a few proverbial shiny and sweet things.