Ali Holder on flowers, music and the “compost effect”

I'm Ali Holder, founder and florist of Flora Sincere, a small floral design studio in Denver, Colorado. Sincerity is at the heart of everything I make. Flowers have shaped my life in more ways than I can count, and Flora Sincere is a vessel that allows me to share their beauty and impact with others.

I like to say that flowers found me, rather than me discovering them. I grew my first garden in 2022, during a particularly turbulent time in my life: the end of a long-term relationship, some financial insecurity, and finishing grad school. A garden is an unflinching teacher. It shows you, over and over, the inevitability of growing, letting go, and beginning again. Once I started growing flowers, I quickly fell in love with designing with them, and the creative energy just snowballed. It reconnected me with my inner child and my creative self after many years away from art.

As usual, I'm working on a few things at once. My brain loves a little creative chaos, and I'm rarely focused on just one thing at a time. As we enter the heart of autumn in Denver, I'm designing and planting my spring 2027 garden. My fiancé and I are also planning expansions to our home garden, where we'll be married in spring 2028. It's a cherished space for both of us, and we're so excited to hold our ceremony there.

I'm also developing a design series inspired by pieces of music I've played or that hold deep meaning for me from my past life as a classical clarinetist. I hope it becomes a way to use flowers and other materials to honor that former creative identity and that time in my life.

Beyond that, I have client designs in the works for the upcoming holiday season, and on the personal front, I'm always tinkering with my home on a random interior project (or two… or five).

My process usually begins with observing the world around me and my own experiences, and staying receptive to the desire to create. From there, it's hard to predict how a piece will develop. Sometimes I sketch things out before beginning to design with flowers, but often not. I'm very selective about my ingredients and try to let the flowers and materials speak to me. I always study their mass, texture, color, shape, form, and movement when deciding what to use.

To me, working with flowers is a practice of both exercising and releasing control. It's a dichotomy, but it's important to leave room for the material to decide what it wants to do, rather than what I want it to do. The designs I love most come from a state of play, like a dance with the materials.

For me, a piece isn't finished until it's been photographed (although sometimes after designing I am just too exhausted!). A teacher once told me a design wasn't done until I had captured it, and it's through flowers that I've been discovering photography as an art form in its own right.

Beyond seasonal flowers and materials, which always influence my work, I'm fascinated by vessels and vases. I'm obsessed with all things vintage and spend many weekends puttering around antique stores looking for unique pieces. I recently took a handbuilding ceramics course with my friend Allison at the Heritage Edition, which I absolutely loved, and it's made me even more drawn to the role a vessel plays in the design itself. There's so much to consider when choosing a vase: its material, color, shape, size, and history.

Nature, music, interiors, fashion, travel, and visual art all feed my work, as do my relationships with myself and others. Some of my favorite ideas come from the corners of antique shops, the music I grew up playing, and the rooms I'm always rearranging at home. I believe there's beauty everywhere when you have time to slow down and look for it.

Through flowers, I've developed a very different relationship with the lifecycle of everything on this earth. You can't work with these materials and ignore their arc of birth, growth, decline, and death. That awareness has given me a lot of peace and has been a companion through grief and grappling with mortality.

My therapist and I often talk about what I call the "compost effect." Rather than seeing something as gone after it dies, I like to see it as composted, returned to the earth so something new can take form and grow. Nothing is ever wasted, lost, or gone; it simply returns to us in a different form, like composting the remains of the garden at the end of the season.

For many years after walking away from something I'd spent most of my life doing, I felt that my relationship with music was a failure. Now I see it as having been composted and returned to me as a new relationship with art and creation through flowers. The lifecycle of it all.

When I first entered the flower world, it seemed like there were strong opinions about the "right" way to flower. After years in the hierarchical, strict landscape of classical music, that experience left me feeling panicked and wondering if I would belong here. My advice is to follow your intuition and flower in the way that feels best to you. No one else's rules have to define your path. You get to develop your own relationship with flowers, and our unique paths and experiences only enrich the flowering world around us.