I’m Jen, founder and creative director of NECTAR + BLOOM , our boutique floral design studio, based in sun-washed San Diego, California.
Although California has been my home for many years, I grew up on an organic produce farm in the Midwest — a childhood during which my older sister and I had our own small flower business growing bright blooms and selling big bouquets at our parents’ farmers market stand. When I graduated, I moved to the mythic shores of California for college and then graduate school, where I studied literature and creative writing, culminating in a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Poetry. Never in my life did I think flowers would return to the center of my life’s path.
Before this chapter as a floral artist, I taught in academia as a professor of literature and writing. I thought then that becoming the university professor I had wanted was my life’s dream, but something bigger was calling me. I needed to be making art. I needed to reach more people. I left academia to create NECTAR + BLOOM , where my passion for the inspiring, empowering, and transformative nature of flowers allows me to craft stories in the language of flowers. It also provides a home for my passion to teach and empower others as well.
Beyond flowering and writing, I am also a certified yoga teacher, reiki practitioner, student of Ayurveda, and a devoted runner. I am passionate about bringing creativity + wellness together in my work, classes, and workshops, and I find the compositional process of floristry to be both healing and poetic.
My work is a way to create poems in the language of flowers. My calling is to guide, inspire, and empower you to see manifest what you seek through the remarkable and multi-sensory medium they provide.