Maddy is a flower farmer and the founder of Bloomcourt Farm, a New York based farm rooted in restoration, community, and everyday beauty. With a background in hospitality, event planning, and environmental nonprofit work, she brings a deeply intentional approach to both growing and gathering. At Bloomcourt, flowers are cultivated on reclaimed land with organic practices, creating a vibrant ecosystem that supports both people and pollinators alike. Her work is guided by a love of natural beauty and a desire to create spaces where connection, memory making, and curiosity can flourish.

Through Bloom Camp, Maddy opens the gates to her farm, inviting creatives into the rhythm of the land. She offers a space to slow down, harvest with care, and experience the quiet magic of working with flowers at their source, encouraging a deeper connection to seasonality, place, and process.

Shannon Cowan is a floral artist and the creative force behind Strange Bodies, a studio rooted in the surreal, the sensual, and the deeply felt. With over eight years in floristry, her work treats flowers as a medium for storytelling — drawing inspiration from tangled landscapes, shifting tides, and the more mysterious edges of the natural world to create designs that feel both grounded and dreamlike.

Through Bloom Camp, Shannon invites creatives into an intuitive, immersive way of working, one that values curiosity over perfection and connection over convention, offering space to slow down, get your hands in the earth, and create from a place that feels uninhibited.

Zara Castany is the owner and lead designer of Fever Dream Floral, a New York City based studio rooted in sustainable practice, working exclusively with locally and regionally grown materials. With over a decade in floristry, her experience spans retail, freelance, weddings, corporate work, and education, shaping a thoughtful and well rounded approach to design. Guided by an intuitive eye for color and composition, Zara creates work that feels romantic, ephemeral, and quietly enchanting.

Through Bloom Camp, Zara brings her passion for education and community into a hands on, supportive space, sharing foundational techniques, thoughtful critique, and an ethos of sustainability. She invites designers to deepen their skills, trust their instincts, and explore new ways of working that feel both intentional and entirely their own.

Join us for a full-day, field-to-vase experience centered on exploration, seasonality, and stepping outside of routine. Bloom Camp is an invitation to rediscover what draws you to flowers in the first place—to reconnect with YOUR why—through play, time outdoors, and a more instinct-led approach.

Morning: Gathering & Bouquet Design
We begin the day in the garden, gathering thoughtfully curated seasonal blooms. You’ll revisit foundational techniques while exploring new approaches to bouquet making, with a focus on form, balance, and composition.

Afternoon: Harvesting & Tablescape Design
After lunch and a midday reset, we shift into a more expansive mode. We begin with a pastel painting session—an open, intuitive exercise drawing inspiration from the fields, gathered florals, and anything your eye lingers on. It’s a moment to slow down, observe, and translate color and form through a different medium. From there, we move back into florals, harvesting and working with a new selection of materials to create sculptural centerpieces. This portion explores movement, layering, and designing in conversation with space.

Evening: Setting the Table
As the day fades, the group comes together at the house to build a full tablescape installation, combining individual pieces into a shared environment. The work culminates in a professionally photographed immersive moment, followed by a long, communal meal set within the pieces we’ve created together.

Throughout the day, we’ll move between guided instruction and open exploration, with an emphasis on intuition, texture, and seasonality. Expect a balance of technique and play, structure and softness.

This experience is less about instruction and more about permission—to wander, to experiment, and to reconnect with your own creative interests and curiosities in a setting that feels generous, relaxed, and full of possibility.

What’s Included:

• Guided instruction and demos from Zara and Shannon and hospitality from Maddy

• All flowers and materials for 1 bouquet and a lush tablescape (1 compote or bowl arrangement and 3 bud vases)

• All materials and guidance for one pastel painting to take home, led by Alex Peacher

• Professional photography of your work by Elvira Kalviste

• Meals, beverages and refreshments provided by Chef April Lechuga-Dupont

This workshop is designed for florists, by florists, especially those in our community who are building, evolving, and looking for space to grow creatively.

This isn’t about perfecting technique or meeting expectations. It’s about loosening up, trying new approaches, and making work that feels like yours. About taking up space and catching our breath.

We’ll work with what we gather, follow what feels interesting, and let the flowers lead. Change your mind, start over, push an idea further than you normally would. It’s a space to experiment, create content, and reconnect with what first drew you to floristry, returning to the essence of why you started.

Think of it as a floral day camp. Collaborative, playful, and rooted in community. You’ll leave with new ideas, fresh work, and a clearer sense of your own style, wherever you are in your process.

We created Bloom Camp to meet a need we’ve felt within our own community. A need for space to grow beyond the day to day, revisit the fundamentals, and actually enjoy the process again. So much of floristry can become about output, timelines, and client expectations, and this offers a chance to forget all that!

Close enough to the city to feel easy, but far enough to feel like a retreat, Bloom Camp shifts the pace without the weight of travel or heavy logistics. It is designed to be approachable and accessible, set in a space that feels open, natural, and grounding — giving you room to play, think differently, and return to your work with a fresh perspective.