Erin Ostreicher is living her childhood fantasy. The 32-year-old florist says that when she was a kid growing up in Westport, Conn., she dreamed of working with flowers. She made dolls out of hyacinth, drew blooming buds incessantly and sketched her "dream greenhouse." Now the Skidmore College graduate runs her own bridal-oriented floral design company, Nectar & Root, out of a Winooski storefront, in tandem with a small bridal boutique called Cult of Flowers Bridal. After eight years of designing flower arrangements in a cramped Burlington studio space, Ostreicher moved last year into the West Canal Street storefront, where she sees clients by appointment. She began stocking clothing and jewelry, with a mix of vintage and contemporary pieces, in December. When it comes to flowers, Ostreicher has a distinctive style. She calls it "romantic but effortless" and "a little bit wild." There are no perfect roses in her assemblages. She often incorporates wildflowers with full-petaled blooms, such as peonies and garden roses, into bridal bouquets that look like they've been scooped from a carefully stocked pasture in a Romantic painting. Her work is a little messy, a little whimsical and utterly entrancing — the right match for brides looking for an artistic take on traditional bouquets and decorations. For one of her own wedding bouquets (she made two), Ostreicher bunched together sweeping strands of spiraea she found by the side of the road. The effect was quite dreamy, as evidenced by the pictures in her online portfolio. Ostreicher may have fantasized about working with flowers as a kid, but she didn't start studying the form until after college. She spent her undergrad career immersed in creative writing and visual art, of which she says that "a lot ... involved flowers, or was described as being flowery and had a lot of landscape themes." After graduating, Ostreicher worked at publisher Verve Editions and at Crow Bookshop, both in Burlington. "I kept surrounding myself with floral-related things," she recalls. Her interest piqued by some flower-themed books that Verve was handling, she started buying up the gardening section at Crow, she recalls: "I had kind of forgotten that I had this grand scheme at 7 of being a florist, but then it came back to me." At the time, Purple Shutter Herbs still occupied the Winooski storefront that would become Nectar & Root. "I was looking into learning about herbalism and…
Erin Ostreicher is living her childhood fantasy. The 32-year-old florist says that when she was a kid growing up in Westport, Conn., she dreamed of working with flowers. She made dolls out of hyacinth, drew blooming buds incessantly and sketched her "dream greenhouse." Now the Skidmore College graduate runs her own bridal-oriented floral design company, Nectar & Root, out of a Winooski storefront, in tandem with a small bridal boutique called Cult of Flowers Bridal. After eight years of designing flower arrangements in a cramped Burlington studio space, Ostreicher moved last year into the West Canal Street storefront, where she sees clients by appointment. She began stocking clothing and jewelry, with a mix of vintage and contemporary pieces, in December. When it comes to flowers, Ostreicher has a distinctive style. She calls it "romantic but effortless" and "a little bit wild." There are no perfect roses in her assemblages. She often incorporates wildflowers with full-petaled blooms, such as peonies and garden roses, into bridal bouquets that look like they've been scooped from a carefully stocked pasture in a Romantic painting. Her work is a little messy, a little whimsical and utterly entrancing — the right match for brides looking for an artistic take on traditional bouquets and decorations. For one of her own wedding bouquets (she made two), Ostreicher bunched together sweeping strands of spiraea she found by the side of the road. The effect was quite dreamy, as evidenced by the pictures in her online portfolio. Ostreicher may have fantasized about working with flowers as a kid, but she didn't start studying the form until after college. She spent her undergrad career immersed in creative writing and visual art, of which she says that "a lot ... involved flowers, or was described as being flowery and had a lot of landscape themes." After graduating, Ostreicher worked at publisher Verve Editions and at Crow Bookshop, both in Burlington. "I kept surrounding myself with floral-related things," she recalls. Her interest piqued by some flower-themed books that Verve was handling, she started buying up the gardening section at Crow, she recalls: "I had kind of forgotten that I had this grand scheme at 7 of being a florist, but then it came back to me." At the time, Purple Shutter Herbs still occupied the Winooski storefront that would become Nectar & Root. "I was looking into learning about herbalism and…