Rooted in Detroit’s east side, Mother of Pearl is reimagining what floral design can be—seasonal, regenerative, sustainable, and always guided by nature herself.
But the story of Mother of Pearl didn’t start in a floral studio. It started with community and food — and a dream of returning home.
After living in New York, Bree Hietala and her husband decided to return to Michigan to grow food for themselves and local restaurants, grocers, and neighbors. They began farming on Detroit’s east side, first growing produce for Roses Fine Food – a thoughtful diner-esqe establishment knowing for paying fair wages and yummy homemade meals.
Hietala also worked with farm-to-school programming, but found herself doing mostly administrative tasks there, while her interests in permaculture and truly getting her hands dirty grew.
“One day I asked the owner of Rose’s, Molly Mitchell, if I could make table arrangements for the restaurant in addition to providing produce,” she says with a laugh. “That turned into centerpieces, then installations, then weddings — and suddenly we had a floral design business.”
But from the beginning, it was never “just” floral design.
“It’s everything,” she says. “We grow our own food. We grow our own flowers. We share and trade with other local farms. Every step of how we run this business is about sustainability — for the land, for our neighbors, and for the planet.”
Hietala says Mother of Pearl’s approach has evolved into what she calls mimicking nature. They study the exact way forsythia leans toward the sun in early April, how meadow grasses fall when the wind shifts, where the pink shows up this week along the roadside.
“We watch growing patterns in nature — that’s our teacher,” she says. “Even in a centerpiece, we’re recreating the feeling of something you might just stumble upon in a field.”
Local sourcing isn’t a trend for the studio — it’s a rule. They don’t use floral foam or chemicals. And if a client requests something out of season?
“It’s our job to show them that there’s a more beautiful story right here,” Hietala says. “Sophisticated design starts with where you source it.”
GHOST ACRE FARM
And when the installation comes down Hietala and her team have started working to ensure the plants are repurposed.
In nature, there isn’t waste, she says. Everything cycles back, and we need to mimic that in what we do, too.
That ethos has shaped some remarkable recent work — including an event at Michigan Central Station, where Mother of Pearl built hundreds of tiny meadows using foraged plants. After the event, they were replanted in a nearby public park.
“That’s how I want to operate going forward,” she says. “Events should add beauty to the city that lasts.”
Hietala and her husband own a few farms. Ghost Acre Farm – the original Detroit food farm founded about ten years ago – has become a thriving pollinator haven with fruit trees, wildflowers, and a hoop house. In 2025, the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) awarded Ghost Acre Farm a $100,000 grant designated for constructing a new washing and packing facility to support the farm’s operations, which will come into play this next growing season.
Nearby, Hietala and her husband purchased five city lots where they employ a technique called Lasagna Gardening, a no-dig, no-till method of creating garden beds by layering cardboard and compost. It supplies produce and connects neighbors through a hyperlocal food system.
GHOST ACRE FARM
The Flower Studio is located in an old Church at Chene and Forest, and the couple bought five more lots behind that they are now affectionately calling ‘The Hills.’
“Years ago there was a lot of debris and cement dumped there. Now – years later – it’s covered with hills and grasses and it allows our kids to play in unstructured zones in nature,” Hietala says. Part of the area is also used for annual flower production and an event space.
Their hyper-local approach extends beyond food distribution. Most of the Mother of Pearl team lives within a block of the studio. And if a bride wants a certain color palette that their farms aren’t producing, they simply go out into nearby neighborhoods and seek it out.
There’s so much joy in discovering what’s right in front of you, she says. The more you look, the more magic there is.
Mother of Pearl is returning to for the November 6 Sustainable Urban Design Summit (SUDS) with new work — a celebration of one of Hietala’s favorite Michigan plants, light purple blooms wrapped in papery yellow husks.
“Plants and flowers are keepers of the seasons changing,” she says. “We track them like storytellers — lilac to peony to goldenrod. SUDS is one of those events that lets us show how nature is always moving.”
When asked what the most rewarding part of owning Mother of Pearl is, Hietala points to her one-year-old and four-year-old kids.
“They come to work with us. They watch us get our hands dirty and seek out the beauty in nature. More often than not, the rooms in our house are filled with plants and flowers being prepped for an event,,” Hietala says. “If they grow up knowing that nature is magical — and worth caring for — that’s everything to me.”
Mother of Pearl is proof that sustainability is not an aesthetic. It’s a way of living.
“It feels like a dream,” she says. “To grow something from scratch, to shape it alongside the land and the community — and to trust that the earth always gives us what we need.”
Her advice to others imagining something big?
“See how the original teachers are doing it – and that’s nature,” she says. “Nature has already figured it out. We just have to follow the patterns.”
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