Iryna Petrenko writes about flowers. She left Lviv in 1997, opened a flower shop in suburban Chicago in 2003, and ran it for fifteen years before selling it in 2018. The shop did weddings, sympathy work, weekly orders for restaurants, and the long quiet middle of the year that nobody writes about.
Local Florists is what she does now. She covers the practical questions, like how to choose a delivery service when you cannot drive to the shop yourself, and the harder ones, like what to send when you do not know what to say. She writes from the side of the counter she stood on for twenty years.