Dec. 4, 2025

Patience Pickner believes in the power of petals.

Flowers can express love, shared sorrow, elation, praise, consolation, the wonder of holidays and a welcome for new arrivals. In the 30 years that Pickner has been assembling bouquets, she has never made a delivery without being greeted with a smile, she said.

Her skill with flowers has been acclaimed both nationally and internationally.

Pickner describes herself as an organic designer.

“I love bark and branches and wasp’s nests, everything that’s grown in nature,” she said. “I’ve been told that I’m a romantic design, soft and pretty and more elegant. It depends on my mood a little bit. Organic and romantic—if those two things had a baby designer, that would be me.”

Now, after almost two years representing a collection of floral farms in Ecuador and Colombia, Pickner has returned to her retail roots with a flower shop in her Sioux Falls home, Patience Ann Designs. She calls it an atelier, which is, she joked, a fancy way to say, “a flower studio.”

It’s another step in a career that has taken her from a floral and home decor store in Chamberlain that drew customers from across South Dakota to:

• Serving as lead designer for an autumn party at the White House.
• Decorating a room in a castle in Belgium.
• Creating bouquets for large online florists such as Urban Stems, The Bouqs and Flower Shop Network.
• Teaching design classes and presenting stage programs in more than 20 states and three countries.
• Winning the South Dakota Floral Association Designer of the Year award three times.
• Achieving certification from the American Institute of Floral Design and Professional Floral Communicators International, among other professional groups.

And that came after Pickner took a leap of faith and began a career basically because when a bank put a struggling Chamberlain floral shop up for sale, she thought to herself, “Oh, wouldn’t it be fun to play with flowers all day?”

“I was artistic, and I had always been drawing and painting, but I didn’t know anything about flowers,” Pickner said. “I was self-taught, and I took a lot of classes, and I went to a lot of conventions, and I volunteered with designers, and I learned like a sponge. When I had an opportunity to compete in a design contest, I always did it even when I was not very good. When you enter a contest, win or lose, you always come away learning something.”

As her reputation grew, her peers in the floral industry asked her to take charge of design shows and to teach classes herself. Pickner generously shared what she calls the tips, tricks and techniques that would make her students better designers.

Pickner traveled with her students to the Netherlands and Belgium to learn a European style of flower arranging. She began freelancing and acting as a consultant for major companies, helping with product development, trend prediction and product innovation. Pickner is tentatively scheduled to visit China in April to help with product development there.

Her trip to the White House came after she took part in a stage program with Tim Farrell AIFD, one of the country’s top floral designers. He asked her then if she would be interested in designing the floral arrangements for a White House event. She agreed, even though she doubted it would ever happen.

“The next week he called and said he was putting together a team for their Halloween party and asked me to be one of the lead designers,” Pickner said. “That was a cool experience, but it’s kind of surreal walking through the White House with a floral knife in your hand.”

Pickner and three other AIFD-certified designers created the bouquets for President Barack Obama and his family, which were changed twice a week, and turned the Rose Garden into the scene of a Halloween party for military personnel and their children.

“It was a really neat event,” Pickner said. “They had Cirque de Soleil people there and fun activities out on the lawn. We had a 30-foot faux tree covered with artificial leaves and flowers. It was very classy with lots of pumpkins and foliage and fall flowers. It wasn’t meant to be scary at all.”

Pickner was invited back to help with Christmas decorations, but as a small-business owner, she couldn’t miss the holiday season at the Picket Fence in Chamberlain. That was the store she had established when her three daughters were young.

“I would have big open houses, and people would come from all over the state for home decor and flowers,” Pickner said.

Ron Anderson, a salesperson with North American Wholesale Florist Inc. in Sioux Falls, started selling flowers to Pickner at the Picket Fence in 1998. She is well-liked in the industry, he said, and has experience in everything from retail to working with the farms that produce the flowers.

“She can give you three carnations in a vase or give you something that’s just going to make you say, wow,” Anderson said.

Two years ago, after a divorce, Pickner sold her retail business to her manager and moved to Sioux Falls where her children and three grandchildren live. She decided to take a couple of months off to see what the universe had to offer.

“I knew it had to be in flowers,” Pickner said. “That’s all I know, all I love. That’s my passion.”

What the universe quickly offered was a design and product development position with Galleria Farms, the collection of flower farms based in Colombia and Ecuador. A contact in Miami was looking for someone who knew the floral industry well, understood trend development and could help develop products. She would choose which bouquets to showcase and show clients upcoming trends.

“If peach and burgundy are trending for 2026, farms need to know that so they can get the right things in the ground,” Pickner said. “I had never worked on the mass-market side of flowers before. We sold to Albertson’s and Trader Joe’s and big-box stores like Costco, Sam’s and Target. My job was to create bouquets and visit the farm and work with the farm to get the right product planted.”

It meant traveling 10 to 15 days a month, and that was a lot of time away from her daughters, her grandchildren and her boyfriend, John Holbrook. Pickner started considering a return to retail, but she wasn’t ready to commit to renting a storefront.

If she opened her atelier, the demand would be there, Anderson told her. Sioux Falls has fewer flower shops than it did 30 years ago, he aid. Considering the metro and suburban population around the city, it is underserved, he added.

“There are not very many actual just flower shops,” he said. “Just a handful. Actual high-end flower shops that will give you a wow-factor, not many.”

Pickner also missed collaborating directly with customers. In Chamberlain, many of the people who walked into the Picket Fence walked out as friends, she said.

“I do care about my customers, and the special aspect of having a studio is that I don’t have the overhead I did with a storefront,” Pickner said. “So my prices can be really good, what I’m able to offer my customers.”

Kayci Halbersma began walking into the Picket Fence when she was 10. Seventeen years ago, when Halbersma was engaged to be married, she registered for wedding gifts at the store. When she returned to Chamberlain for Thanksgiving, Halbersma took along a Pickner-designed bouquet for her mother.

Her mother had ordered an arrangement from Pickner for her daughter several weeks earlier.

“They were absolutely beautiful. I was blown away, and they lasted for a couple of weeks,” Halbersma said. “I love the connection. She’s still got that small-town feel. I just trusted that I could say, this is who they’re for, and I know they’re going to be beautiful.”

The bouquet Halbersma received included red and orange roses, hydrangeas and daisies. It did not have baby’s breath. While the list of flowers that Pickner loves is lengthy — peonies, double tulips, hellebores and Banksia Protea among others — baby’s breath doesn’t make the cut.

“Every florist has their flowers that they do not like, and baby’s breath is mine. I think it smells like bad feet,” Pickner said. “It can be used beautifully, but I don’t like working with it. There are so many beautiful fillers other than baby’s breath that are beautifully fragrant and seasonal and more interesting texturally.”

Pickner offers “everyday bouquets” and flowers for special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries and “I love you.”

Creating funeral arrangements gives her a chance to give the grieving family something significant and showcase what was important to their loved one. Pickner embodies her first name when working with mourners, said Ang Riedel, assistant funeral director at Heartland Funeral Home.

“She’s patient with people, and she fits her name perfectly,” Riedel said. “She knows what people want. It’s a talent. I just love her because she’s such a wonderful person, and she’s someone that definitely you can trust.”

She will provide the arrangements for weddings, although she doesn’t expect that to be a large part of her business. “I do like to work with brides on a budget,” Pickner said.

And if you’re interested in wedding trends, Pickner wants you to know that while in recent years brides chose soft and muted tones, color is coming back. Think of coral, salmon, hot pink and burnt orange. Or pink with a touch of burgundy. Classic white and green never go out of style, Pickner said. She’s also seeing a lot of pale yellow and blue or pale yellow, peach and lavender. With singer Taylor Swift’s propensity for pink and an upcoming wedding, that also will be a factor with engaged Swifties.

In other words, suit yourself.

“Brides are being very individual,” Pickner said. “They’re creating the wedding they want and doing what they want to decorate.”

Pickner also enjoys making silk flower arrangements. She will be a vendor at the 605 Made Holiday Market from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday in the Cherapa Place parking garage. It is co-organized by SiouxFalls.Business, Sew Doggy Boutique and Knotty Gnome Variety & Salvage, with The First National Bank in Sioux Falls, Active Generations and Dakota Business Finance as sponsors.

Were she younger, the 56-year-old Pickner said, she’d be interested in starting an artistic cooperative where multiple creators could come together in one place. For now, however, she’s focusing on Patience Ann Designs.

A room in her home has been converted into a workshop with a cooler and design table. Pickner likes the flexibility that comes from working out of her home, but moving to a storefront is still a possibility.

“I like the freedom of having it in my home, so I’m torn,” she said. “Some days I think it will be within a year, some days I’m not sure I know when. That’s kind of where I’m at right now.”

To see a full list of 605 Made vendors, click below.

605 Made Holiday Market vendor guide