This month, Amanda Rodgers of Bouquet Atlanta, a frequent collaborator of the Colombia garden rose grower Alexandra Farms is part of the designer spotlight. Bouquet Atlanta's style is a teeming romantic garden party with an edge and Amanda loves incorporating unexpected ingredients in their designs. Her work stands out in luxury weddings and corporate branding events, especially with the use of one of the most loved types of roses — garden roses.
Amanda Rodgers Shares More About Her Life Story and How She Discovered Her Love for Flowers
To kick off this spotlight, people are always curious to know more about the floral designer. On this occasion, she'll share more about herself, how/when her floral career started, and how she started her floral business.
Amanda started her earlier years as a French-trained pastry chef, where she spent most of her career within the food industry, finally settling on teaching the culinary arts. Nowadays owner of her own floral business 'Bouquet Atlanta', she recalls always having loved growing flowers but spending little time making arrangements.
Several years ago when her mother was diagnosed with cancer and dementia, she became her primary caregiver. One day she bought a bunch of flowers from the farmer’s market and tried arranging them at home. Soon she was buying flowers every week and putting more effort into her arrangements. It became a loving cycle of flowers.
Amanda shares:
"I started buying any and all floral books and began enrolling in lots of online floral education. I approached floral arranging as puzzles and began to ask myself how I could mix so many different colors, shapes, sizes, and textures to become cohesive and pleasing to the eye. Looking back, flowers became a path for me to traverse through the pain and grief of my mother’s suffering."
The Arrangement That Marked a Before and After in Her Floral Career and Design Style
Several months after starting her floral journey, Rodgers created an arrangement, and it just felt right, like a lightning bolt where she felt:
"This is what I am meant to do. The next day, I formed my LLC and the rest is history!"
She thinks of herself as a 'Florist Farmer' - a floral designer who has a flower farm to enhance her designs. A couple of years ago, the designer found her dream house, a 19th-century farmhouse with a tiny barn and several cleared acres of land. Before she even moved in, Amanda started tilling the ground to create the first garden bed. Her first fall at the farm, she remembers planting dozens of ornamental shrubs, perennials, peonies, thousands of daffodils, and hundreds of bearded Iris and starting an heirloom rose garden. Today, she and her team are currently growing year-round, producing flowers from March till frost in late October, and growing mostly annual crops of flowers including Ranunculus, Anemones, poppies, Campanula, orlaya, Agrostemma, lisianthus, Cosmos, and Dahlias.
Bouquet Atlanta's style is a teeming romantic garden party with an edge and Amanda loves incorporating unexpected ingredients in their designs. Her work stands out in luxury weddings and corporate branding events, especially with the use of one of the most loved types of roses — garden roses.
Using Garden Roses to Enhance Her Floral Designs
Throughout her designs, the designer has used some of the most gorgeous garden rose varieties by Alexandra Farms. She shares more about a few of her favorites, why these roses are unique, and what makes them stand out in her floral compositions:
"These roses are my favorite to design with for several reasons: first, they are gorgeous in a range of colors and sizes, they open fully and have a long vase life for a garden rose and lastly they perform well out of water for foam-free designs. My current favorite Alexandra Farms roses for my designs is Wabara Rose Miyabi. I love the graduation of color."
With this said, Amanda also shares her favorite garden roses for weddings now that 2024 has commenced the wedding season in full spectrum.
"My favorite wedding roses are Rose Tsumugi, a perfect blush rose with hundreds of petals, Rose Purity (Ausoblige) for its dainty full blushy cup form and the spray rose, and Rose Wedding Rosever Spr, a beautiful blush with multiple rose heads per stem that open fully."
Mixing and Matching With Garden Roses in Floral Compositions by Amanda Rodgers
Many may be wondering what garden roses are the easiest to combine and use in flower designs, and Amanda is here to give you tips on which ones by Alexandra Farms she loves to mix and match.
She says:
"Just recently, I spent two weeks at Accent Decor creating florals for their beautiful vessels. I ordered the new Rose Princess Holly's Hope for my designs and fell in love! It is a gorgeous cream rose with a peach center that harmoniously blends with both demure wedding palettes and more live color stories."
Working With Garden Roses by Alexandra Farms
During the talk with Amanda, she also came to share what makes these types of roses so special to work with, and here's what she had to say:
"On my flower farm, I grow a variety of heirloom roses. The beauty of a garden-grown rose is almost unmatched. Most of my roses only bloom for a couple of weeks a year. Alexandra Farm's roses are beautiful like garden-grown roses but are consistently available year-round, and as a plus, they have a divine scent as well."
And last but not least, why choose garden roses for floral designs one may wonder? Amanda recommends using this specific type of rose when designing because they add a special shape, size, and visual aspect with their opening while being an abiding choice, offering easy beauty and luxury to any arrangement. Every new rose variety introduced each year keeps designs fresh and innovative.
To see more of her work, make sure to visit Amanda's Instagram account.
Photos by @bouquetatlanta.
