April 15, 2021 Page 7
Natural Simplicity from front page
One of Mario’s many arrangements. Marisa Scarda and Mario Sandoval in their shop.
the ones in which a customer gives Mario a
direction and free creative license. He doesn’t
plan out any of the arrangements he makes.
Rather, they all live in his head and flow
through his hands into a beautiful bouquet.
To make your fresh flowers last longer in
a vase, Marisa offers this simple yet underused
advice: water them. The most common
mistake she sees buyers make is filling the
vase once and never again. “The flowers
are drinking a lot of water the first couple
of days,” she says. In addition, take out the
flowers that have died so they don’t affect
the water or the flowers that are still thriving
and keep them in a cool place. Marisa’s
favorite flower is the tulips, and when she
brings home a bouquet of tulips, she likes
to toss a penny in the bottom of the vase to
make them last longer.
With thirteen years under their belt, they’ve
come to know and love their El Segundo
base. As much as they love putting together
arrangements and working with the flowers,
it’s the smile on their customer’s faces
that is their favorite thing. Marisa says that
flowers bring happiness to the sad and joy
to the happy. “We have one of those little
stepping stones that are around town, and
ours says, ‘The Earth laughs in flowers.’”
She plans to continue to bring smiles to the
city of El Segundo. •
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setup. From there, they have to wait till all
the other vendors set up their services, and
then they come in with the flowers Mario
prepared and set it up as quickly as possible.
Mario goes to the flower market in the
early hours of every morning. This way, all
the flowers he works with are fresh. Marisa
gets to the shop early as well and preps
bouquets for the day’s deliveries.
During the pandemic, the shop hit its most
difficult time when the LA flower market shut
down. No shipments meant only working with
local flowers and on limited supply. Despite
that, they worked with what they had, and
the shop is now back up and running. “We’d
love to expand, but there’s only one Marisa
and one Mario,” she says.
Though they love designing the arrangements
and planning for events, their favorite
part of the job is the community they’ve
built. “We have a lot of customers that we’ve
worked with for years,” she explains, “So we
know what their mom or girlfriend or wife
like, so they can just say make an arrangement.”
Sometimes a new customer will come
in and say they’re going on a first date, for
example, and Marisa be able to recommend a
soft color that doesn’t spell romance the way
a dozen red roses would. That recommended
flower might carry through their relationship.
The best arrangements, they share, are
Mario preps a row of identical bouquets for an event.
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