For the overtired, overstimulated, and quietly exhausted.
“The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.”
- Poppy Z. Brite
At our little store in Hudson, we sell our own goods alongside a rotating collection of other things we love, plants, objects, candles, and sometimes dried flowers.
If you know our story, you probably know that dried flowers were once a complete obsession of mine. For a while, they were almost everything.
We sold so many of them. But burnout is real, even when it comes to the things we love most.
Truthfully, I was never really a florist.
I’m a creative director by trade, and dried flowers like plants, interiors, objects, storytelling simply became another beautiful, fragile medium to work within.
A language. A way of arranging emotion.
I love plants in all their forms, but more than that, I love the feeling of tending to something, gardening will always be my first love.
Working with a medium until it changes shape. Allowing yourself to evolve alongside it.
Apart from asking for dried flowers the thing we hear the most right now in the shop is this:
People aren’t sleeping.
Honestly, it makes perfect sense.
The world feels messy and loud at the moment. People come into our space looking, if only briefly, for relief from all of that. A softer place to land.
And the numbers are staggering.
Around one in three adults in America are not getting the recommended amount of uninterrupted sleep, and somewhere between 50–70 million Americans live with ongoing sleep disorders.
Nearly 70% of adults report difficulty falling asleep, while seven in ten say they struggle to stay asleep through the night.
Sleep has quietly become one of the great collective griefs of modern life.
Slumber one of my husbands favorite words has always fascinated me.
My younger sister Bethany and I, back home in Australia, could sleep sixteen hours at a time when we were kids.
Meanwhile, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve stayed awake all night.
It’s not from lack of trying, it’s simply not in me.
Even when I first moved to New York from Australia and my circadian rhythm should have been completely upside down, eventually sleep always found me.
Then my son was born.
For the first few years, he barely slept at all. And what I discovered very quickly is that without sleep, I simply cannot function. Everything becomes thin at the edges. Emotional, fragile, strange.
So when customers tell us they’re exhausted, I really do understand.
There’s also something strange happening culturally.
We live in a world that celebrates productivity and overstimulation, while quietly stripping away the conditions that allow people to truly rest.
Phones beside the bed. Anxiety as background noise. Constant bad news. Artificial light. Work bleeding into every hour. It’s no wonder our bodies are struggling to surrender.
This summer, we’re turning the front of the store into a kind of resting space of quiet slumber. A collection of ideas, rituals, products, plants, teas, scents, and small comforts intended to help all of us sleep a little better.
We are certainly not experts. Not even close.
Just like-minded souls who love gardening, waking to birdsong, open windows, and the deep kind of sleep that feels almost medicinal.
But there’s something quietly healing about curating things that encourage rest. Creating objects meant not for productivity, but surrender.
Maybe that’s what we all need right now.
x Rebecca
This is a little bit more of a rambling than my normal entries but I hope you enjoy it
all the same.
