From California Wildflowers to the Grammy Stage: The Story Behind Modern Pressed Flower
My relationship with pressed flowers began long before Instagram, before viral moments, and certainly before I ever imagined seeing my work on a Grammy stage.
It began on my family’s farm in Modesto, California, a city whose name means “modest” in Spanish, surrounded by almond orchards, my mother’s garden, and the wildflowers scattered through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.
As a teenager, I started pressing flowers using a wooden press my brother built for me - a design I still use today. When I later moved to New York City to pursue an acting career, that press came with me. I sold pressed flower cards and handmade collages in boutiques and on street corners. Even after I began making a living as an actor, I kept a stash of pressed flowers in my dressing rooms, composing between rehearsals and performances.
Pressed flowers were never a hobby. They were a parallel life and a daily creative practice.
When Everything Changed
After decades of refining my technique and creating thousands of compositions, one of my artworks went viral on Instagram in 2019. Almost overnight, I was approached by leaders in the fashion and music industries about collaborations.
At the beginning of 2020, I met with the team at Oscar de la Renta. Their vision was ambitious: to create an entire collection based on my pressed flower artwork.
And then the world shut down.
My family quarantined in my parents’ cabin in the California foothills, unsure what would happen next. Despite the uncertainty, I made a quiet decision: I would continue creating the collection as if it were moving forward. My mantra during that time was, Nothing good can be lost.
Months of Quiet Work
The early days of the pandemic were full. I was homeschooling my young children, writing a new musical with my husband, and gathering hundreds of weeds and wildflowers each day around the cabin to press.
During that season, I created a significant body of work rooted in a deep love of nature and the resilience of wild plants. Weeds and wildflowers grow and adapt without coddling. They persist. They became a powerful metaphor for the grit we all needed to survive 2020.
That same spirit shaped both the artwork and the musical we were writing.
A defining element of my work is the combination of cultivated flowers from my family’s farm alongside weeds and wildflowers. I don’t create literal bouquets or landscapes. My compositions are abstract and design-driven, focused on color, movement, shape, and texture, arranged in a way that feels organic yet inevitable.
After completing a series of large-scale compositions, I drove them to San Francisco to be photographed in extremely high resolution, capturing every delicate detail. Those images were transformed into textile patterns, printed onto fabric in Italy, and brought to life in the Oscar de la Renta collection, as well as in a sold out gallery show at the High Line Nine in NYC.
Photo: Getty Images
A Surprising Moment
When Taylor Swift walked onstage wearing one of the designs and accepted a Grammy in it, I had no idea it was coming. I found out in real time, watching from home.
It felt like a surreal culmination of months of quiet, faithful work. Flowers gathered near my hometown, pressed by hand in a small cabin, had found their way to one of the biggest stages in the world.
The collection went on to become, to my knowledge, the most successful in Oscar de la Renta’s history. More importantly, it affirmed something I had long believed: pressed flowers belong in the highest levels of design.
That moment emboldened me to build something larger.
Building a Global Community
During that same season, I began teaching my flower-pressing techniques online. At the time, few artists were offering in-depth instruction, especially around the technical challenge of preserving color, something I had spent decades refining.
Hundreds of students enrolled in my first two-hour Zoom workshops. Since 2020, I’ve taught over 8,000 students worldwide.
Pressing flowers is both meditative and highly technical. My goal isn’t simply to teach my method, but to help artists develop their own voice. Creativity deepens when we master technique, and then give ourselves permission to interpret it in our own unique ways.
Through Modern Pressed Flower, I offer recorded courses, live workshops, in-person events, a Bloom mentorship program, and a global directory that highlights and supports pressed flower artists, particularly women, around the world. I am proud to have led in person workshops in Malibu, New York, London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Mallorca, Italy and Australia, and to be a mentor to 100 women around the world, many of whom now have their own thriving pressed flower businesses.
Expanding the Work
Alongside my teaching practice, I founded Domain of the Flowerings, a fine art and design studio where my pressed floral work expands into fashion, interiors, and decorative arts.
Through this studio, my compositions have been translated into fine art prints, wallpaper, textiles, hand-knotted rugs, porcelain tabletop collections, and cashmere and silk accessories. I have exhibited in galleries in New York City and collaborated with international luxury brands and artists around the world.
If Modern Pressed Flower is where I teach and cultivate community, Domain of the Flowerings is where I share my own evolving body of work.
My mission has always been to raise the standard of this art form, to preserve craftsmanship, honor the natural world, and demonstrate what is possible when we pay attention to the beauty already growing around us.
It began in a modest town.
It led to a Grammy stage and a New York gallery.
And it continues to grow around the world.
