NORTH OGDEN — Morgan Cullimore has a passion for flowers that, during a difficult time of unexplained illness, blossomed into a successful floral arranging business, taking the Utah woman to weddings across the world.
Cullimore began experiencing debilitating abdominal pain and exhaustion in 2016, making it hard for her to do simple tasks like going to the grocery store. Between having to step back from her seminary teaching job and going to about 20 different doctors in one year without answers, Cullimore was very discouraged.
To help lift her spirits, a friend reached out and invited Cullimore to assist a woman who needed freelance workers to process flowers for her. She didn’t know anything about flowers at the time, but she was willing to give it a try. She began with the simple task of filling buckets with water and picking leaves off flowers.
Floral arrangement done by Morgan Cullimore, of North Ogden. (Photo: Morgan Cullimore)
“It was just very healing to me, because I had forgotten that I was so sick working for her,” Cullimore said.
On her good days, she worked with flowers, and on her bad days, she began researching flowers and taking online classes. That’s when she decided she wanted to go into the flower business. She started doing side jobs, and the floral work brought her great joy in the midst of sorrow from her illness.
Cullimore eventually learned she had median arcuate ligament syndrome, and after surgery, it was as if she was never sick.
In July of 2017, Cullimore founded Olive and Sage Floral, named after two fundamental aspects of her life. Olive comes from biblical symbolism, representing the olive branch.
“I know that the Savior offers second chances, and I feel like he kinda gave me a second chance at life after my surgery,” Cullimore said.
Sage comes from her love of the outdoors, specifically hunting, and alludes to sagebrush.
“Flowers were such a healing part for me, and so I wanted to offer that for other people, and so I’ve tried to utilize my business as a way to bring joy and happiness for people getting married, but also for neighbors and friends and family and just try to bring God into all of it as much as I can.”
Cullimore believes that because she desires to help others through her business, God has opened doors for her. Through referrals and her Instagram account, she has gained a large following and has worked with brides across the United States, as well as Greece and Italy.
She loves arranging florals for weddings because of seeing the brides get excited, and even emotional, when they see her arrangements.
A wedding floral arrangement by Morgan Cullimore, of North Ogden. (Photo: Megan Cullimore)
“I … love being a part of something so special, because a wedding day is a big day, and so I … just feel really grateful that brides trust me enough to let me be a part of their special day,” she said.
She strives to create arrangements that reflect the bride’s personality and has a lot of fun doing that. She typically asks them what their favorite flowers are, and some of her favorite arrangements have been when she has utilized flowers that have significant meaning to the bride. She recently created an arrangement that included blue bonnets for the bride’s grandma, who had passed away.
“There’s a lot of meaning to (flowers), more than you would even think,” Cullimore said.
In 2020, Cullimore gave birth to a baby girl. She had gone back to teaching seminary and decided to quit her seminary job and focus on her daughter, Charlie, and her flower business. It was a difficult decision for her because she was passionate about the teachings of Jesus Christ. She prayed and asked God to help her continue to testify of her Savior through the beauty of her flowers.
She said that is when her business “exploded,” and she’s been able to teach about God, Jesus Christ and second chances just about everywhere she’s traveled.
“God really, really cares about (people), and I’m grateful that he’s trusting me to be a tiny little instrument in his hand to do that.”
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
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