Innovative Bay Area floral designer Teresa Sabankaya will team up with renowned floral expert Debra Prinzing, founder of Slowflowers.com to offer an inspiring two-part workshop for floral professionals at a beautiful private garden in Santa Cruz.

Santa Cruz, CA, June 20, 2016 — Innovative Bay Area floral designer Teresa Sabankaya will team up with renowned floral expert Debra Prinzing, founder of Slowflowers.com to offer an inspiring two-part workshop for floral professionals at a beautiful private garden in Santa Cruz.

“Slow Flowers Creative Workshop,” set for 10 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 20, is designed to help floral designers and Farmer-Florists clarify, document and communicate their personal artistic message as a floral professional by focusing on brand-building, floral storytelling and media messaging.

Sabankaya, founder and creative director of Bonny Doon Garden Co. and creator of the unique Bonny Doon Posies arrangements, will work with participants to explore and expand their approach to garden-inspired design and identify the inspiration for their floral designs.

The will participate in her hands-on exercises that build support for their designs’ inspired floral elements and complementary elements and focus on how to make the mechanics that support their style work as they create an arrangement of their own.

Sabankaya, whose floral designs have become highly desirable due to their unique style of arranging and elegant garden appeal, is considered one of the most innovative florists in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Prinzing is a writer, speaker, outdoor living expert and advocate for American flower farming and author of “Slow Flowers: Four Seasons of Locally Grown Bouquets from the Garden, Meadow and Farm” and “The 50 Mile Bouquet: Seasonal, Local and Sustainable Flowers.”

The website slowflowers.com is an online directory to help people find floral professionals who are committed to using American-grown flowers.

The workshop will take place over one and a half days in a private garden in the Santa Cruz area. Guests will receive location and map to the garden after they register.

Cost for the workshop is $525 and includes all instruction, materials, supplies, flowers, morning coffee/refreshments, two lunches and a cocktail reception in the garden. It also includes a guest’s own gallery of images from the sessions and their design work.

In a safe, supportive and intimate setting, the small group will spend 24-plus hours focusing on Slow Flowers “brand building” and how each participant can find his or her own voice as a floral storyteller. Subjects that will be covered include:

• How to evoke and express your personal story as a creative individual
• How to play with words to describe the natural world’s color, texture and form
• How to tell your flower memoir as metaphor for your brand
• How to flex your sensory muscles
• How brand development can capture key distinctives in words and images that define you
• How to use storytelling in a media pitch — learn how to be a resource for targeted media

On the second day, Sabankaya will lead participants in a floral design exercise that identifies the essential spirit of “garden-inspired design.” They will learn how to build the support for the inspired/complementary elements and learn how to make the mechanics work.

After her presentation, participants will choose from local, seasonal roses, dahlias and other signature blooms and create an arrangement that expresses their personal take on garden-inspired design. Sabankaya will cover sourcing of botanical ingredients, growing decisions and foraging approaches. Coached by her, each student will photo-style her/his creation for web, marketing and portfolio use.

During the design portion of this module, Prinzing will interview each participant individually about their philosophy and provide them with tips on creating a floral narrative for their design.

Registrants will be sent a pre-planning packet of exercises created by Prinzing two weeks prior to the workshop. The goal for these exercises is that the more time and thought invested in the exercises, the more rewarding the 24-hour experience will be.

About Teresa Sabankaya:
Sabankaya is the founder and owner since 1999 of The Bonny Doon Garden Company, a full-service floral design studio, florist, and botanical gift shop.

Sabankaya holds an influential position as one of the most innovative florists in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has exhibited her floral art annually at the “Bouquets to Art” exhibition at the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, the National Trust Filoli’s Estate in Woodside, and various other floral design and garden shows.

Sabankaya’s floral designs have become highly desirable due to their unique style of arranging and elegant garden appeal. Her wedding floral styles have been featured in numerous wedding blogs and magazines including Smitten, Sweet Violet Bride, Style Me Pretty and Green Wedding Shoes.

She has been featured in Amy Stewart’s “Flower Confidential” book as well as her blog, and was featured “like a florist from 100 years ago” in the PBS documentary “Botany of Desire,” based on Michael Pollen’s bestseller Botany of Desire.

Sabankaya’s trademarked creations, Bonny Doon Posies, have been a core part of her retail business from the beginning, and have been featured in such media as “CBS Sunday Morning,” Romantic Homes magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Santa Cruz Sentinel and The New York Times.

She is a Certified Green Gardener; a member of Slowflowers.com, an online directory of florists who source their materials locally; and Greatgardenspeakers.com.

About Debra Prinzing:
Prinzing is an award-winning author, speaker and leading advocate for American-grown flowers. She is the founder and producer of the online directory slowflowers.com, a guide to American flower farms, and florists, shops and studios who source domestic and local flowers. She is the author of 10 books, including Slow Flowers and The 50 Mile Bouquet.Her book “Slow Flowers” (St. Lynn’s Press, 2013) received a Silver Medal from Garden Writers Association in 2014.

Prinzing is a contributing editor to Country Gardens magazine and her feature stories on architecture and design appear regularly in the Los Angeles Times’ Home section. She is a contributor to Garden Design, and her work has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, online publications and blogs.

A Master Gardener, the Seattle-based Prinzing has studied landscape horticulture and design at South Seattle Community College. She is the current president of Garden Writers Association and a member of the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers.

For more information, contact Teresa Sabankaya at teresa@bonnydoongardenco.com or by calling (831) 566-9925. To register for the workshop, go to https://www.eventbrite.com/e/slow-flowers-creative-workshop-tickets-25988990771.

Contact:
Marci Bracco Cain
Chatterbox PR
Salinas, CA 93901
(831) 747-7455
http://slowflowers.com/