Amnesia roses, pink hydrangea, stock & cosmos — photographed at Grace Cathedral, Nob Hill

Lovely Coven

San Francisco

An Introduction

The first thing my mother taught me about flowers was how to reflex a rose.

You turn the outermost petals back — gently, against the bloom’s own instinct — until the flower opens itself wider than it meant to. She showed me once. Everything after that was mine to figure out.

I spent fifteen years as a teacher. Fifteen years building programs, directing stages, designing curriculum, shaping other people’s children into confident, capable artists. I loved that work. And I carried this alongside it — quietly, carefully — because flowers were the thing I did just for the love of it.

In November, I resigned. And for the first time, the love was allowed to become the work.

That became Lovely Coven. Not a business I built to make money, but a practice I built because I couldn’t not. Because cutting a stem at the right angle on the right morning, with the right flowers, in a room where someone is about to be surprised by beauty — there is nothing else quite like it. I wanted to share that. That’s what this is.

This month, I sold my first $800 arrangement.

The Dark Covenant · Bespoke Rush Order · No. 34

The $800 isn’t a statement. It’s what allows me to buy more flowers — to cover the stems, the time, the care — and to keep showing up next Wednesday with something new. When the work pays for itself, the work continues. That’s all I need it to do.

If you had told the boy who grew up in the Black Hills that he would spend his forties in San Francisco, surrounded by peonies and hellebores, making arrangements for people who trusted him to make something beautiful for their lives — he wouldn’t have believed it. Not because it seemed impossible. Because no one around him was dreaming it yet.

He’s dreaming it now. In public. Every Wednesday. And I’m glad you’re here for it.

Share this with someone who loves flowers — or someone who needs to be reminded that it’s not too late to do the thing they love most.

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From the Green Witch

There are thirteen arrangements in the world this week that came from my hands.

That number is not a limitation. It is a decision — and decisions, in floristry as in life, are what separate a practice from a habit.

I work from a studio at the top of a hill in San Francisco, in a neighborhood that has survived earthquakes, fires, and the peculiar social upheaval of a city that reinvents its identity every decade while insisting it has always been exactly this. Nob Hill does not reinvent. Nob Hill endures. The Grace Cathedral bells still mark the hour. The fog still rolls in past the Fairmont by nine. The peonies, for this exact week, are magnificent.

I have been called the Green Witch of Nob Hill by enough people that it has become, simply, what I am. Witchcraft and floristry share more than aesthetics — both require knowledge of what a living thing needs, what it will do under pressure, and exactly how much manipulation it can sustain before it stops cooperating. The flowers tell you, if you pay attention. Most people don’t pay attention.

This newsletter exists because I want to give you a reason to start.

The Floral Dispatch is not a trend report. It is not a “five ways to style your mantle” listicle dressed up in a good font. It is a letter — from someone who has spent years watching what happens when a living thing is placed in a room with intention — to the people who sense that flowers are more than decoration and haven’t quite found the language for it yet.

Every Wednesday, I’ll write about what’s in season, what I’m building at the atelier, what San Francisco looks like through a florist’s eyes in a given week, and what you should actually know. There will always be a tip. The tip will always be real — no filler, no vague encouragement to “stay curious.” Real craft, in plain language.

Welcome to the Dispatch. Thirteen people received an arrangement from me this week. Now you’re receiving this. Consider yourself included.

— Brandon

The Green Witch of Nob Hill · Lovely Coven

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What’s in Season

Late May · San Francisco · The last week the peonies forgive you for being late

On the Peak of Something Perishable

Peonies are at their exact moment right now. Not the beginning of it — the moment. The blowsy, reckless, clouds-of-silk center of the season, when the blooms open so fully they seem structurally improbable and the fragrance in a closed room becomes something you’d pay for separately if you could.

San Francisco is an unusual city for peonies. The coastal fog moderates our temperatures in a way that extends the season — what blooms in May in Marin will hold longer here, where the afternoons rarely tip past 65°F before June fog rolls through. The cold nights in the Richmond, the Inner Sunset, up on Nob Hill — they are, accidentally, ideal peony preservation systems. The city doesn’t know it’s doing this. It rarely does.

Hot pink peonies, purple delphinium, veronicastrum & fan palm — a statement piece for a Nob Hill lobby

If you are buying peonies this week, you are buying them at the right time. Next week they will still be available; they will be fine. But this week, right now, a good peony from a good source is doing what it was built to do. There is a specificity to catching something at its peak that has nothing to do with price. It has to do with timing. Timing is everything — in theater, in conversation, and in flowers.

Also in market this week: garden roses are finally opening properly (the fog-delayed ones are worth the wait). Sweet peas are in their last flamboyant push before summer warmth finishes them. Ranunculus are winding down but the remaining ones are deeply saturated — the reluctant ones always are.

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Tip of the Week · No. 01

The Peony Paradox

Buy them closed. Not tight — closed.

There’s a distinction that matters here. A tight peony bud — firm as a marble, no give, green-washed — is still weeks from opening and will likely rot before it blooms in a vase. That is not what I mean.

What I mean is the bud that has begun to soften at the crown, that shows a little color, that yields slightly when you press it gently with a thumb. That bud is ready. It simply hasn’t been told yet. You’re buying potential, not product — and potential is worth more if you know what to do with it.

Here is exactly what to do with it:

Strip every leaf below the waterline. Every single one. Bacteria colonizes submerged foliage within hours and shortens vase life aggressively. Cut the stem at a steep diagonal — forty-five degrees minimum — under running water, not in the air. The diagonal maximizes surface area for water uptake; the running water prevents air bubbles from entering the cut before it’s submerged. Put them in a clean vase with fresh cold water and a cool room overnight. Plain cold water, no flower food, no sugar, no aspirin tricks — peonies don’t need them and the additives often do more harm than good.

A sunny windowsill on a mild SF afternoon will open a prepared peony within twelve hours. A cool hall will hold it for days. You now control the timing.

If you buy peonies already fully open, you’re buying someone else’s flowers — you’re inheriting the last twenty-four hours of someone else’s arrangement. There is nothing wrong with them. There is also nothing left.

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This Week at the Atelier

Thirteen arrangements went out this week. None of them looked alike.

The scarcity is the point. Lovely Coven builds thirteen arrangements per week — not because the work couldn’t scale, but because it shouldn’t. When you limit the work to what you can execute with full attention, every arrangement carries the full weight of that attention. The client who receives one this week received something genuinely considered, not something expedited.

This week the atelier moved between registers: the operatic (hot pink peonies shoulder-to-shoulder with deep purple delphinium, veronicastrum spiking upward like something conducting the whole piece), the painterly (lavender Amnesia roses dissolving into pink hydrangea and stock, so dense the gold urn nearly disappeared underneath it), and the quietly strange — dark hellebores nodding over a bed of ammi majus in a gold compote that looked like it had been borrowed from a cathedral and never returned.

That range is intentional. Lovely Coven does not have a signature look. It has a signature level of attention. The rest follows the week, the flowers, and the room they’re meant to enter.

Peonies & purple delphinium with veronicastrum

Amnesia roses, hydrangea & stock in gold urn

Hellebores & ammi majus — the witchy one

If you’d like to receive one of the thirteen, inquiries are open at lovelycoven.com. There is usually a wait. The wait is also the point.

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