About Maki

Maki Aizawa Gilman is the founder and designer of Viola Floral Design.

A native of Japan, she has always been fascinated with color and texture. Her mother is Tsuyo Onodera, a renowned kimono artist who established one of the few nationally accredited schools devoted solely to the art of kimono making in Sendai. Maki spent her childhood at the school, watching students learn to hand-stitch kimonos, absorbing the craft of combining construction with color and design.

At the age of ten, Maki decided she wanted to learn Ikebana, the art of Japanese floral design. After several years of intense study, she earned the prestigious shihan degree from the Hongen Enshu school, a branch of Ikebana. She holds a teaching certificate from the school.

“Training of Ikebana is all about simplicity, line, details and the interplay of texture – each stem has a face, front and back,” she explains.

In 1995, Maki came to the United States for school and earned a B.A. in Art History from San Francisco State University in 1999. While attending school, she got a job at a floral atelier in SF where she learned European floral arrangements. Today she fuses her rigorous Ikebana training with her experience in European design to create her own distinctive style.

Flowers in her arrangements have no limitations. Depending on the theme of the event, she can create a lush, loosely styled mix of classic European flowers such as garden roses, French tulips, viburnums and lilies; a sculpture of tropical orchids balanced with water, stones and bamboo; or a whimsical bouquet of fragrant gardenias and feathers. She loves working with delicate flowers such as Japanese poppies, peonies, narcissus, muscari, and ranunculus, but also believes that selecting a few stems of flowering branches can make an enormous statement in a large space.

Unlike many florists, Maki works with a variety of containers – including suiban, containers for ikebana, glass vases, iron pots, metal urns, antique china and vintage pottery pieces. One of her favorite materials to work with is equisetum, a bamboo-like plant that she shapes into a natural holder for flowers. She also likes to drape her pieces with shibori fabric sent to her by her mother.

Always experimenting, Maki avoids arrangements that are “too structured” but rather sees each piece as an opportunity to create a unique art object. She is a favorite with the Bay Area art community, and has even been asked to contribute pieces to local galleries not as a floral designer, but as a featured artist. Her clients include The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Lab Gallery and de Rosa Preserve as well as private estates around the Bay Area.

Maki is a regular at the flower market in San Francisco and local nurseries in Sonoma. Keeping an eye out for whatever is fresh and unusual, she looks for blooms with the most distinctive shape and brightest color. She currently lives in Sonoma with her husband and son. She has formed relationships with several farmers and she supplements her design with mosses, rocks and lichens found on her nature walks. In addition, at home she grows rare flowers not seen at the flower market such as lotuses, water lilies, passion flower vines and fragrant mock orange trees to add a flair to her arrangements.