Podcast
Modern Floristry — A Design Blog by Studio Herbage Florist
Modern Floristry is the design blog of Studio Herbage Florist, read aloud in the voice of James Dempsey AIFD. Each essay is a reflection on the practice of floral design — on sourcing and season, on craft and care, on what passes between a studio and the people it serves. These are the same essays published in writing at http://studioherbageflorist.com, offered here for anyone who would sooner listen than read. New readings arrive every other week.
- Episodes
- 10
- Releases
- Every two weeks
- Typical length
- 10 min
- On air since
- 2026
- Latest episode
- 10 hours ago
Episodes
10 episodes, newest first
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10 min
The Word for What This Is
Episode 35
Show notes
Most of the wreaths on doors this time of year are made by the million in production facilities and sold as a commodity. At Studio Herbage, the foam-ring wreaths built through the year, most of them for sympathy, begin with a step almost no one sees: covering the edge of the ring in salal, so the client pays for the flowers rather than for hiding a seam. James uses that step to say what the word practice has come to hold for him, drawing on kadō, the Japanese way of flowers, and on right livelihood, taken as a plain, secular working ethic about how a living is earned, and closes with a question for listeners about their own work.
Written and read by James Dempsey AIFD, CFD, owner and creative director of Studio Herbage Florist in Johnstown and Malta, New York.
Read the full essay: https://www.studioherbageflorist.com/blog/11-01-2026/The-Word-for-What-This-Is
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10 min
What We Carry Past
Episode 34
Show notes
A deer on an early-morning drive totals the studio’s delivery van, and choosing its replacement turns into a question about what the practice has become. James Dempsey AIFD, CFD reflects on how a full mind lets the edges of the road fade, and on a wedding planning request he declined, partly out of capacity and more honestly out of the fear of owning the clock. A practice changes shape without announcing it, and most of that change is noticed only afterward.
Read the full essay: https://www.studioherbageflorist.com/blog/10-18-2026/What-We-Carry-Past
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10 min
The Frame We Can't See
Episode 33
Show notes
At Studio Herbage we train on the phones every week of the year, and what I hear most is a price said out loud and then explained. This episode turns the honest accounting of the last one from the flowers onto the people who sell them, and then onto me: the pocketbook frame every salesperson brings to a call, and the frame I carried through my years building arrangement and bouquet programs in the mass market, before I understood that what I was paid and what I had contributed were two different numbers.
Written and read by James Dempsey, AIFD, CFD, owner and creative director of Studio Herbage Florist in Johnstown and Malta, New York.
Research referenced:
Singh, Marinova, Singh & Evans (2018), Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, on salesperson behavior in recorded sales conversations.
Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts & Wardle (2010), European Journal of Social Psychology, "How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world."
Read the full essay: https://www.studioherbageflorist.com/blog/10-04-2026/The-Frame-We-Cant-See
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6 min
What We Cut Short
Episode 32
Show notes
In this reading, James dempsey reflects on what floristry actually costs the flowers it depends on. Not the shrink the books already absorb, but the loss standing perfect in the cooler, every stem cut alive, on a schedule that serves our day and not its own. An honest accounting of the ending beneath the beauty, and what it asks of the person who orders the flowers and arranges them anyway.
Read aloud by James Dempsey AIFD, CFD - owner and creative director of Studio Herbage Florist
Read the full essay: https://www.studioherbageflorist.com/blog/09-20-2026/What-We-Cut-Short
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8 min
The Third Run
Episode 31
Show notes
As summer closes, the field begins to change, and I follow what it is making now. This week that meant driving out to the same farm three times, something I have never done in all my years with them, for flowers that were only ready this week. An essay on working with a season that is ending, and on why the flowers we make are honest precisely because they do not last.
Written and read by James Dempsey, AIFD. Part of Modern Floristry, the design blog of Studio Herbage Florist.
Read the full essay: https://www.studioherbageflorist.com/blog/09-06-2026/The-Third-Run
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11 min
The Date That Cannot Move
Episode 30
Show notes
A funeral hour is fixed almost as soon as the death is, and whatever the flowers turn out to be, they have to be right at ten o'clock on Thursday. What surprises most families is that the short notice usually has nothing to do with the death. It comes from where flowers sit in the order of the week. James Dempsey AIFD on what a compressed date actually costs, what it does not cost, and the one question that changes the whole conversation.
Read by the author. The full essay is published at https://studioherbageflorist.com.
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10 min
What Outlasts a Name
Episode 29
Show notes
Decades ago, when I was deciding what to call this studio, I deliberately did not call it Flowers by James Dempsey. This essay is about why: about names and legacy, about the standard a practitioner builds that for now lives inside a single person, and about what it would take for a craft's knowledge to outlast the one who carries it. It closes on Halemaʻumaʻu, the crater at the summit of Kīlauea, whose collapsed floor is filling back toward its rim — a reminder that what drains away can come back within a working life.
Read by James Dempsey, AIFD. Part of Modern Floristry, a design blog by Studio Herbage Florist.
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8 min
What the Stem Wants
Episode 28
Show notes
On flowers that keep moving after they leave the studio. A tulip goes on growing in the vase, and Bells of Ireland and snapdragon turn against gravity overnight, so an arrangement quietly rearranges itself on a table at home. A reflection on the material's own agency, on what Ikebana taught about following a stem rather than forcing it, and on why the studio tells a client what to expect before the flowers ever go out the door rather than after.
Read in full at studioherbageflorist.com/blog.
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10 min
The Rose That Serves No One
Episode 27
Show notes
There is a rose in the studio's Ephratah garden that never once goes into a client's design. It is grown more than almost anything else and cut for no one, kept only for its scent and for the reason it first drew James into growing at all. This essay follows a single July morning from that rose out into the rows that do get cut, the clematis and gooseneck and garden roses bound for a wedding and a sympathy piece the same week, and asks what it means to design from what a particular piece of ground is actually offering, now, rather than from what we had in mind.
Read aloud by James Dempsey AIFD.
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14 min
What the Client Leaves With
Episode 26
Show notes
The Q2 closer. A reflection on what a client carries out the door — the design that lives for weeks, and the change in how they see that doesn't fade with the flowers. On the transformation that happens across years of a long relationship, and why the value of the work was never only in the object.
Read in full at studioherbageflorist.com/blog.
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