Picking Flowers With Pearl

Florist Pearl Holmes on fantasy, form and the art of sculpting with nature.

All photos in this post are courtesy of PEARL; three images are from Studio Ghibli films.

In this third edition of “Picking Flowers,” we step into the dreamworld of Pearl Holmes, the artist behind floral design studio PEARL, where flowers lean, spill and climb as if caught mid-movement in an anime still. Her arrangements—ruffled roses, cascading orchids and spindly wild oats—capture a delicate balance between structure and spontaneity, a moment where nature and fantasy quietly intersect.

Drawing from the landscapes of the Bay Area, the meticulous precision of Japanese gardens and the lush surrealism of Studio Ghibli, Pearl’s work feels at once nostalgic and otherworldly. Her arrangements embrace the unexpected—pale pink blooms tangle with speckled caladium leaves; bleeding hearts arch like brushstrokes over gently nestled pansies; sunset-hued fuchsias dangle above clusters of azaleas. In the conversation that follows, Pearl shares her inspirations, how her mother shaped her approach to flowers and her love for small, beautiful things.

Have flowers always been a part of your life?
I honestly think always, I don’t really have a memory without flowers. My mom’s side of the family were farmers and I grew up with a very close connection to the earth. My mother and grandmother are fierce gardeners and I used to spend lots of time outside playing with pruned branches, weeds and deadheading flowers. One of my earliest floral memories was collecting flowers from my mom’s garden and mashing them all up in a bowl and then going door to door trying to sell it as perfume. Not that much has changed.

How did you first get into floral arranging, and what was your learning process like?
My mom had a huge impact on me becoming a florist. She brought the fantasy into the garden—it was the place where fairies lived. Stick forts needed to be built, and holes had to be dug. As an artist herself, my mom would give me creative chores and one of them was making arrangements for the dinner table. It was one of the few places I felt comfortable being creative.

As I got older, I tried so hard to stay away from the arts and pursued ecology through college. However, when I graduated and couldn’t get a job anywhere, I ended up getting a job at a flower shop in San Francisco. I later worked as a production manager for an amazing florist in the Bay Area and she opened my world up to so many other different types of floristry and visual art florals. But it really took me sitting at home during the pandemic with flowers from my backyard and a camera, redoing and remaking arrangements 10 times over, to really learn what I liked and what my style is.

How does your environment shape or inform your creative process?
I work all over the place but I will always be based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Not only is the natural landscape insanely beautiful, but garden culture is huge here and there are overgrown rose, jasmine and camellia bushes everywhere you go. It is so much more inspiring when you can cut a branch yourself, rather than going to the flower market for a perfectly manicured one. 

The Bay Area is a sacred place to me. My family goes back to the Gold Rush in S.F., and then my grandmother immigrated here from Guatemala in the 60s. I can be so much more creative here than I can in other places because I know it so well. I know where all the best trees are, where jasmine grows under the freeway… Roots figuratively and literally are very inspiring to me and I like being able to appreciate the place that shaped me into who I am through my designs.

Many florists are embracing oversized arrangements, yet your smaller scale designs feel just as impactful. What drew you to this approach?
Honestly, I really try to make things big but I end up whittling it all away until the arrangement is tiny again. But I do like it when you feel like you’re entering into another world and I think smaller flowers make you want to look in close and get into every detail. Oftentimes when I am arranging, I will center everything around the smallest flower as my focal point. Big flowers end up stressing me out and taking up the entire arrangement and then I get kind of lost in the size of it all, but give me something tiny and I will arrange it happily with tweezers.

Anime transforms the ordinary with detail, playful proportions and dreamlike beauty. Your arrangements echo this—petite yet profound, with whimsy and wonder. How has anime influenced your work?
Anime has always inspired my work and escapist tendencies. Flowers are often featured in anime and usually in over-the-top surrealistic scenes. There is a moundy, stacked quality to 2D florals in anime (like in Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba and Sailor Moon) that I am super inspired by and try to emulate. The greens are usually a perfect true-green and the florals are hyper saturated in anime and the color schemes in my work mirror that as well.

Is there a dream project or installation you'd love to create someday?
I would love to do florals for a period piece. If you are doing a Victorian-era greenhouse scene, call me.

Is there a specific flower or plant you feel embodies the spirit of PEARL?
Pansies always. Playful, flat and colorful. A super tall growing garden rose is also up there.

Which flowers are you most excited to use right now, and what materials have you been incorporating?
Every year, I am reborn in spring. I am looking forward to all the spring flowers that will be coming out soon—especially irises. Each year I try to use them in an arrangement that I like and every year the season ends before I can do that. This year, though, I want to use a lot more vegetation in my work. I think we, as florists, pushed the limits of how many flowers can fit in one arrangement so I would love to use more grasses and foliage this year.

What do you hope people see or feel in the worlds you create?
I hope that people look at my work and it brings them some joy. I hope that it allows people to look at the world a little bit closer and with a little bit more appreciation for the small beautiful random things in nature. I hope it makes people love flowers like I do.