Telling stories with seasonal flourishes is how Abigail Decorte of Cottage Garden Florals likes to do it. Abigail was raised in California’s Central Valley and now calls San Diego home, where she lives with her husband and their two children. As a floral designer, she creates wedding and event designs that tell meaningful stories through color and texture, sourcing flowers from local farms and gardens whenever possible. As a floral educator, she welcomes students from across North America into the world of locally grown flowers, time-honored techniques, and insightful design principles, with a focus on romantic forms and expressive textures.
Abigail Decorte – The Heart of Cottage Garden Florals
In her studio, flowers are treated as art, yet her deepest hope is that when they reach someone’s hands, they feel familiar and alive, like an echo of gardens once loved. This is the heart of Cottage Garden Florals: designs that still feel inspired in and by the garden, carrying its story, its fragrance, and different kinds of beauty.
From musician and teacher to wife and mother, it took years for Abigail to find the career that sparked her heart with joy, but floral design was planted in her heart decades before her business was born. Well, reborn actually.
Cottage Garden Florals began with her mother, Claudine. In the dark of many early mornings, she would dress her in corduroy and Peter Pan collars and take her to the San Francisco Flower Market to gather flowers for orders and weddings. She carried her mother’s shiny Cottage Garden badge to the vendors, who often slipped her leftover stems – makeshift fairy wands as they walked the aisles together.
She never imagined that more than twenty years later she would return to a flower market of her own. Older now, without her mother or her badge and be undone by a single fragrance. It was one of those breath-catching moments when past and present meet, tender and familiar, like strangers who somehow know your name.
A Business That Sprouted Over Time
Over the past six years, Cottage Garden Florals has taken many forms, eventually finding its own cobbled path. At times, weeds have pushed through the stones, and her steps have caught on hidden roots along the way. Yet on either side of that winding path, no matter the direction, there has always been inspiration, growth, and changing seasons.
One of the most meaningful lessons she has learned along this uneven, breathtakingly beautiful journey is to approach each design as something already known. Her past continually informs her present – in every stem placement, each flower choice, and the inspiration she instinctively reaches for.
Abigail's work feels like a return to the gardens she has loved, the countryside paths walked with family, and the roads dotted with wildflowers that have always led her home. When she designs flowers for others, she hopes they recognize that sense of familiarity. Each piece is artful in form, yet carries the feeling that it could have flourished in a grandmother’s backyard, a garden once lingered in abroad, or the meadow where a beloved moment took place.
This is her cottage garden!
Photos by: @cottagegardenflorals.
