Jen Lagedrost Cavender of Nectar + Bloom joins Meagan on this episode of the Team Flower Podcast. Nectar + Bloom is a boutique floral design studio and floristry workshop that offers poetically-spirited fine art floral designs that tell stories, invite experiences, and aim to conjure magic and inspiration.

In this episode, you’ll be inspired by Jen’s gift with words as she shares her experience on her parents’ farm growing up and how that propelled her into various stages of life eventually leading to flowers. Jen is sharing the keys to giving oneself permission to carry out actions from a passionate heart. You’ll hear about the symbiotic relationship between creativity and wellness and how to lean into that for your own life. Jen is calling florists to action in taking care of themselves and she’s providing tips on how to do that well with community, support, education, healing, movement, and nourishment.

Photography by: Eline Jacobine Photography, Dear Lovers Photography, Heather Nan Photography, Kim Branagan

Jen grew up on an organic produce farm in the Midwest—a childhood during which she and her sister ran their own small flower business selling bouquets at their parents’ farmers market stand before she moved to California for college and graduate school to study literature, creative writing, and poetry. Jen left her academic career to start Nectar + Bloom, where her passion for the healing, empowering, and transformative nature of flowers as an artistic medium allows her to create and empower others to do so as well. Her studio is based in San Diego, California.

Jen is also a certified yoga teacher, a student of Ayurveda, and a devoted runner who is passionate about incorporating creativity and wellness together into her work, classes, and workshops. She finds the creative and compositional process of floristry to parallel the act of composing poetry and views her work as a way to create poems in the language of flowers.