By Isabella Chan
Love week and Valentine’s Day cause quite the bees buzz in the floral class run by Citlalli Veloz, who teaches Floral Design, Intro to Animal and Plant Phys, and Plant and Soil Sci. The floral design class is all about learning the craft and industry of arranging flowers, upkeeping flowers, taping, and wiring the many flowers they learn about every day.
The class creates these floral arrangements for teachers, to sell, or even for students to take home. And this year for Valentine’s, 20 of the bouquets are fully sold and the other 20 are being donated to Memory Care in Visalia as a little Valentine’s treat.
They start the year by learning how to make smaller flower arrangements to prepare for bigger events like now. This class makes bouquets for events and holidays that arrive throughout the year.
Veloz will start preparing for arrangements around a month before bigger events. She’ll order the flowers at WholeSale Fresh Cut on Mooney Blvd and create a “recipe” for students to follow when arranging their bouquets. Students are put into pairs or groups to work together on the flowers. Veloz will prepare an example bouquet for the class to base off their arrangements on, and lightly walk them through the process.
“Creating a single bouquet could take up to an hour or two depending on how the students work, and how focused they are. These Valentine’s ones that are a dozen each, those probably take the kids an hour each.” Veloz says.
Depending on how well the flowers are kept, they can last up to 2-3 weeks.
Zianna Lopez, ‘24, and Julia Ceballos, ‘24, both took an interest in upkeeping and arranging flowers. Ceballos says, “I find flowers and making flowers very interesting and making bouquets, we learn about flowers and how to take care of flowers and upkeep them [in the class].”
Lopez shares, “I chose to do the floral design class because I just really wanted to get what it’s like to build bouquets” and she aspires to hopefully turn it into a business in the future.
With students just as passionate as Lopez in the class, Veloz hopes to expand the class in the future through more subscriptions and dive deeper into the world of flower arrangements.
Veloz thanks those who have supported their flower-making journeys and hopes to continue to sprout admiration for flower design.
All photos taken by i.chan/gigantea
Isabella Chan
Isabella (Ella) Chan ('26) is a first year arts and entertainment journalist for the Redwood Gigantea. You can reach out to her by emailing at isabe.ch5254@vusd.us
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