A Flower Girl’s Dream doesn’t just tiptoe through the tulips

PHOTO by JEFF GOULD

It’s not uncommon to find Sheri Cervantes running around her store in a wetsuit, sopping wet with sand still dripping from her hair, rattling off plant facts while putting together the most perfect, colorful bouquet of flowers you’ve ever seen.

“This is the only town where you can put a sign on the door that says ‘Surfing—Be back in an hour,’ and customers won’t get mad,” Cervantes says, rearranging potted greens on a table in her Sunset Beach store.

Having rediscovered the sanity-saving power of surfing, the 28-year-old business owner spends the time between early-morning fresh-flower wholesale purchases and late-morning vase-life extending hydration processes riding waves directly across the street from her passion-turned-reality flower shop.

Since opening A Flower Girl’s Dream in the southernmost corner of the unincorporated beach community three months ago—and manning it by herself seven days a week since—Cervantes, better known to locals as just “Flower Girl,” has combined the area’s laid-back atmosphere with her passion for “anything different” to create a flora-enthusiast’s heaven.

While most bucket shops stock up on tulips, roses and assorted filler, Cervantes rejects the standard flower varieties, opting instead to offer less-common species like lilies, peonies and cymbidium orchids.

“You’re definitely not going to get carnations and baby’s breath here. That’s so outdated, anyway, like somewhere in the ’80s,” she laughs. 

Cervantes moved to Seal Beach from Colorado Springs after graduating high school and worked first at Sunset Flowers and then Devynn’s Gardens, training under some of the area’s best designers and learning the complicated science behind grooming fresh stems (like how tulips keep growing after you cut them, so trim them shorter than everything else). After leaving Devynn’s (on great terms), Cervantes garnered independent wedding accounts and spent several years chasing empty promises of head designer promotions around Orange County before dropping out to sell mortgages. 

“I got screwed over left and right,” she says of the florists who employed her after Devynn’s. 

“That’s why I always wanted to open my own store.” So when the protein-shake-and-diet-pill store next to her best friend’s restaurant, the Secret Spot, closed down, Cervantes saw the empty storefront as her well-deserved opportunity for floral freedom. 

Before she even had the keys to the unit, the shop’s distinctive vibe was already under way: Her father, brother and cousin immediately drove down from Colorado and built, tiled and antique-stained all of the store’s display furniture; her boyfriend, with delicate cursive lettering, turned a piece of plywood into flower-shop signage; and she agreed to stock hand-mixed lotions and jewelry from local artists.

“The one thing about my store is that everything is custom-made. From the arrangements to the pendant necklaces, everything here is stuff you’ll never find anywhere else.”

With its ever-changing assortment of exotic choices and the astounding creativity put into each bouquet, A Flower Girl’s Dream is a blend of farmers market earthiness and Food Network cake-making challenge skills. And as the exact opposite of Conroy’s and FTD conformity, Cervantes’ beachside store is operating with a fresh perspective in an industry built on clichés.

“I guess you could call it ‘new school,’” she says. “I’m fresh blood, somebody that’s excited and ready to make a difference.”

Referencing contemporary floral-design magazines like Ceremony and Bride & Bloom, Cervantes generates off-the-wall concepts that embarrass long-stem rose standbys: Consider the two clear vases of peace lilies on the counter, each with a bright blue veil-tail goldfish living in its roots (“I thought it would be good for Mother’s Day”); the plumeria leis strung together with dental floss (“It’s more sturdy than thread”); or the graduation party centerpieces with complementary orange slices floating in the water (“like a drink”).

“There are so many things to think about when putting together an arrangement; there are lines you have to look at and color groupings to consider,” she says. “It’s definitely an art form.”

And you thought you could say it with just flowers.

A FLOWER GIRL’S DREAM 3801 WARNER AVE | STE C | HUNTINGTON BEACH 92649 | 714.840.6200

Tags: a flower girl's dream, flower arranging, Huntington Beach, shopping, sunset beach