Meet Our Summit Speakers
meet your summit host
Hey, I'm Jennifer.
Founder of The Flowering Farmhouse
Dahlia Farmer | Cut Flower Educator | Host of The Backyard Bouquet Podcast
Before I became a flower farmer, I worked as a professional photographer for 12 years, and that's part of why this summit matters so much to me. The way we arrange and photograph our dahlias and the visual story we build around them matters every bit as much as how we grow them.
Last winter I hosted The Profitable Dahlia Summit. Over 400 people came, and the number one thing they asked for next was a summit focused on design. So that's what we're doing this September.
I'll be teaching one of the sessions myself. The rest of the lineup is the floral designers and farmer florists I most want to learn from, and I'm bringing them together so we can all learn at the same time.
INSTAGRAM / WEBSITE / PODCAST
Meet Our Speakers
Amy Balsters
The Floral Coach®
Dahlia Bridal Bouquets - Learn Pro Tips!
Amy is an award-winning floral design educator and founder of The Floral Coach®, with over two decades of experience in retail floristry, weddings, and events. Creator of Bouquet Bootcamp® and Team Flower's 2018 Designer of the Year, her work has been featured in Martha Stewart Weddings and Florists' Review.
Dahlias are divas. Let me show you how I wrangle them into beautiful bouquets. From selecting the right style and stage of bloom to structuring a bouquet that stays lush, airy, and full of movement, this will be a value packed design lesson. I'll share the professional techniques that give you consistent results, including how to layer texture, create depth, and achieve that romantic, garden-gathered look without your bouquet falling apart or getting too tight. Whether you're brand new to dahlias or have been designing with them for years, you'll walk away with a clear, repeatable process and the confidence to make dahlias the star of any bouquet.
Galena Berkompas
Micro Flower Farm
Creating a Cottage Garden
Style Arrangement
Galena is a farmer-florist known for lush, seasonal arrangements bursting with texture and color. Every bouquet she creates is a mini garden in a vase, designed to bring joy to everyone who sees it.
Galena will showcase how to harvest, condition dahlias and other flowers to create a beautiful bouquet for your home. Using a mix of dahlias, incredible filler flowers and interesting foliage, you can create an arrangement that feels natural, abundant, and full of charm and gain the ability to have easy, gorgeous bouquets in your home during the entire growing season!
WEBSITE / INSTAGRAM
Niki Irving
Flourish Flower Farm
Designing Centerpieces that Tell a Story
Niki farms and designs at Flourish Flower Farm in Asheville, NC, creating lush, seasonally inspired arrangements for weddings and events. She's the best-selling author of Growing Flowers and serves as Southeast Regional Director for the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers.
Niki will teach you how to create layered, garden-inspired centerpieces that feel artistic and deeply connected to the season. Niki will walk through her design process with dahlias and demonstrate the techniques as she goes.
Jenny Rae Swan
Flowerwell
Designing a Statement Arrangement
Jenny Rae owns Flowerwell Farm and Design Studio in Western New York, where dahlias have been part of her story since day one. She grows over 5,000 dahlias a year and designs in a garden-inspired style built around texture and color.
Join Jenny Rae for a session of designing a larger scale arrangement with all seasonal blooms- dahlias at the centerpoint! Jenny will walk you through her design thought process when working at a larger scale, all while focusing on color and texture. You'll walk away with the itch to design- snips in hand!
WEBSITE / INSTAGRAM
Marryn Mathis
The Farmhouse Flower Farm
From Stem to Stunning: Bouquet Making 101
Marryn is the farmer-florist behind The Farmhouse Flower Farm in Stanwood, Washington, and a returning speaker from the Profitable Dahlia Summit. She brings hands-on farm experience to the wedding side of dahlia design, helping attendees turn garden-grown blooms into romantic, celebration-ready arrangements.
Learn to create a beautiful, hand-tied bouquet while learning the basics of floral design, color pairing, and flower care. This class is perfect for all flower lovers, from beginners to experienced gardeners and anyone who wants to be inspired to create a stunning bouquet with garden fresh blooms.
WEBSITE / INSTAGRAM
Dee Hall Goodwin
Mermaid City Flowers
The Three-Ingredient Dahlia Arrangement: Bloom, Foliage, Filler
Dee is a floral designer and flower farmer in Norfolk, Virginia, where she runs Mermaid City Flowers, a seasonal studio and urban flower farm. Her arrangements, writing, and speaking explore how flowers connect people to beauty and the natural world.
Learn to build a complete dahlia arrangement using a simple three-part framework: dahlias as the stars, one foliage for structure, and one filler for movement. Dee will show you how different dahlia forms play distinct roles in a single vase, from focal point to rhythm to lightness, and how proportion, negative space, and restraint turn a handful of stems into a design that feels considered and complete.
Kristine Albrecht
Santa Cruz Dahlias
Field to Vase: Working with Designers to Breed Better Dahlias
Kristine has hybridized dahlias in Santa Cruz, California, for 20 years, introducing over fifty award-winning varieties that start with her initials, KA's. She co-founded the American Dahlia Society's Dahlia Genome Project, co-authored two definitive books on dahlia breeding and care, and partnered with Stonehouse Dahlias to bring virus-free varieties to growers everywhere.
Kristine shares the story of her dahlia breeding program through the eyes of both the grower and the floral designer. Follow her varieties from the breeding field, through trialing, and into the hands of talented designers, and see how a great dahlia earns its place as the focal flower in an arrangement.
WEBSITE / INSTAGRAM
Lennie Larkin
Flower Farming For Profit
The Perfect Market Dahlia Bouquet: Beautiful by Design, Built for Speed
Lennie wrote the book on making a living growing flowers, Flower Farming for Profit, after turning her own struggling farm into a thriving business through marketing, sales, and strategy.
In this session I'll show you how to lean into that gift to make bouquets that feel one-of-a-kind, bespoke, and collected-not-constructed, while still moving with real speed. We'll trace design thinking through every stage — from how you plant and what you cut, to how a single stem's shape sets the whole arrangement, to dropping the finished bunch in the bucket — so that artistry and efficiency become the same motion instead of competing forces. I'll share clips from a live harvest so you can see how a beautiful bouquet really begins in the field, long before the bench. It's the marriage of art and speed: letting the flowers lead so every bouquet feels custom without costing you the whole morning.
Ellen Frost
Local Color Flowers (FlowerMore community)
The Power of Color: Simple Strategies for Stunning Dahlia Designs
Ellen is a florist, educator, and writer with nearly two decades of experience designing with locally grown flowers, and the founder of Baltimore's Local Color Flowers. She now reaches flower lovers everywhere through FlowerNerd, her weekly newsletter, and FlowerMore, her online learning community.
Discover how a deeper understanding of color can transform the way you design with dahlias. Ellen Frost will explore simple color strategies, from building palettes with a single bloom to using proven design principles that create harmony and impact. This session will help growers and designers unlock new possibilities with the dahlias they grow and love.
WEBSITE / INSTAGRAM
Kate Punnett
The August Press
How to Press Dahlias and Create Art that Lasts Beyond the Season
Kate is a pressed floral artist and founder of The August Press, a flower press company loved by growers across North America. Her practice began in the garden and grew into a fine art form, preserving seasonal blooms into lasting, place-based compositions.
Dahlias are one of the hardest to press flowers. In our session we will learn what varieties press best, the best time for harvesting, how to press, how to know when they are finished pressing and ideas and techniques on art making. This session will inspire you to hang onto the essence of your harvest and use it as a value added product that lives beyond the season.
Christopher Tomaso
Darcy's dahlias
Dahlia Timelapses: Buds to Blooms
Christopher is co-founder of Darcy's Dahlia Farm in Hilliard, Ohio, which he and friend Wyatt Thomas grew from ten backyard tubers into a thriving urban farm cultivating over 1,500 dahlias. Together they supply fresh-cut dahlias and tubers to local markets, events, and home gardeners, all under the watchful eye of the farm's mascot, their dog Darcey.
Christopher of Darcy’s Dahlias will share his experience and knowledge of capturing timelapses. Whether a bloom on a plant or watching a dahlia open more after you cut, you will learn how we do our viral dahlia timelapses.
WEBSITE / INSTAGRAM
Jessie Sierra Ross
Straight to the Hips, Baby (cookbook: Seasons Around the Table)
The Art of the Dahlia Tablescape: Height, Ambience, and Conversation
Jessie-Sierra is a cookbook author, TV contributor, and food and lifestyle blogger whose work celebrates seasonal gathering from her home in Western Massachusetts. A former professional ballerina, she brings a performer's eye to her floral-forward recipes and light, bright photography, seen in her book Seasons Around the Table and in more than 200 appearances on NBC, CBS, and PBS. She shares her ongoing work through her blog, Straight to the Hips, Baby, and her Substack newsletter, Jessie-Sierra: The Last Bite.
You've grown them, cut them, and coaxed them into bloom, now let's set a table worthy of them. In this class, cookbook author and food stylist Jessie-Sierra Ross shares her approach to dahlia-centered tablescapes: choosing the right vessels, layering color and texture, and styling flowers alongside a meal so neither one crowds the other. A live Q&A follows.
WEBSITE / INSTAGRAM
Dani Annala
Dani's Kitchen Shop
The Candied Dahlia: Preserve, Store & Style
Dani has been growing dahlias for eight years, and this year alone she planted 398 tubers in her wild, unlabeled patch of surprises. By day she's a professional cookie artist and owner of Dani's Kitchen Shop, where she candies real dahlia petals to bring the flower's beauty into edible art.
Learn how to transform fresh dahlia petals into stunning, edible cake decorations that hold their color and shape for weeks. In this hands-on class, you'll learn the candying technique step-by-step, proper storage methods to keep your petals fresh and food-safe, and creative styling tips for using them on cakes and desserts.
WEBSITE / INSTAGRAM
Jennifer Gulizia
The flowering farmhouse
Capturing Dahlias: Better Photos with Any Camera
Jennifer is a regenerative flower farmer, podcast host, and educator in Hood River, Oregon, where she grows dahlias and hosts The Backyard Bouquet Podcast. Jennifer believes there's room for more flower farmers, not fewer, and built the Dahlia Design Summit to help growers everywhere design with the blooms they grow.
Your dahlias look incredible in real life. Then you take a photo and something gets lost. This session shows you how to capture better photos of your dahlias using either your phone or a digital camera, covering lighting, angle, and composition. Whether you're photographing tubers for sale, building a calendar, or making your social media stand out, you'll leave feeling confident behind the lens.
WEBSITE / INSTAGRAM
a special thanks to our summit sponsors:
