Valentine’s flower pop-up is a new beginning for Palisades florist

For 10 years, Rosalyn Phipps’ Valentine’s Days consisted of cutting thorns off roses, curating whimsical floral arrangements and leading a team of designers and delivery drivers put together months in advance to ensure that the biggest “flower holiday” of the year went off without a hitch.

When the Palisades fire began in January, burning 6,835 structures, including Palisades Flowers, where Phipps worked as the lead floral designer, all of that went out the window, leaving her unsure what the holiday would look like this year. Though the shop was gone, she became determined to find a way to spend Valentine’s Day the way she has for so many years– surrounded by stems and petals.

“I’ve never missed a Valentine’s Day in 10 years, I’m not missing one now,” Phipps said.

And so, there she was on Friday, Feb. 14. From the ashes, Phipps was putting smiles on faces with her arrangements.

Determined to still do florals, she put together a pop-up flower shop, set up outside a home decor store in Santa Monica on Friday, Feb. 14, after being connected with the shop owner by a former client of Palisades Flowers, an illustration of the strong community and the continued support she has received from Palisadians.

Phipps had reached out to the client after the fire to thank her for the years of business and the client connected her with a business owner who was happy to collaborate on a pop-up after Phipps expressed that she would hate to miss Valentine’s Day.

The reference led Phipps to connect with Hummingbird Home & Co., where she sold flower and planter arrangements on Friday.

For Phipps, it was a way she found to continue her business and love for florals after the heartbreaking losses of the fire.

Even as she sold arrangements, her last day at the then still-standing Palisades Flowers was still a vivid memory.

The day she left the shop, unknowingly for the last time, Phipps and her coworkers saw plumes of smoke. She called clients to let them know the shop would be closing and left for her home in El Monte, getting stuck in gridlock as thousands fled the Palisades.

Later, she found out that the shop had burned down.

It added “insult to injury that this is the time the shop went down,” Phipps said.

By January, extra drivers and employees had been secured ahead of Valentine’s Day, and Phipps and her staff were ready to spend early mornings at the flower market getting blooms and to methodically process and stage the stems in their small shop.

“Trying to fill orders, moving thousands of stems of roses, cleaning the thorns off of them. Our hands always looked so ratty and just filled with flower sap by the end of the day,” she remembered of past Valentine’s Days at the shop.

“I just loved working there. It was a beautiful little seaside town, beautiful weather. You can feel the pride people had in that community and I was really happy to be a part of that,” Phipps said of the Palisades.

But in the post-fire moment she found herself in, she didn’t have much time to reset for Valentine’s Day.

Though she had less than a month to put it together, Phipps worked alongside her mother, Rachel Phipps, to create arrangements for clients that preordered and additional ones for anyone stopping by.

Phipps stood in front of Hummingbird Home & Co. on sunny Montana Avenue, wrapping up flowers for customers. One shopper remarked how much he loved the colors of the bouquet he purchased, another wished fellow shoppers a happy Valentine’s Day as people walked down the street, many clad in shades of pink and red.

“It’s nice to be back working with flowers,” Phipps said, admiring the arrangements she set up in a white bouquet holder. The florals reflected her signature whimsical style, pinks and reds offset with dark greenery. She likes a “wild look,” aiming for her arrangements to appear as if they were just plucked from a meadow.

Many previous clients preordered arrangements to pick up and one shopper drove up from El Segundo to support her business after hearing the story of the shop being lost in the fire.

She is moving forward with another pop-up planned for Mother’s Day and will do workshops and markets in the future as she starts a new business, Root and Petal. But Phipps still thinks about the late nights and busy days she and her coworkers spent at Palisades Flowers.

“Making flowers for birthdays, engagements, weddings, we were there for a lot of milestones for people in the Palisades and it was really special,” Phipps said. “A lot of my favorite memories are just the chaoticness of the holidays and getting through it as a team. After we would have a successful Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day, we’d pop champagne and close the shop and sit around and celebrate and decompress… It was just so fun.”

With an hour of business left, nearly all of the bouquets had been sold on Friday. Phipps called the pop-up her “last hurrah” with Palisades Flowers, though she said she would not hesitate to return to the area if the chance were to arise in the future. Even without the shop and community she loved for years, Phipps will continue her passion for floral design.

“It’s all I know how to do, it’s all I like to do and it’s all I want to do, so it’s my dream job,” she said.