Petal Pop-Ups 2026: Creating Large-Scale Floral Installs
We’re so excited to be partnering with the San Diego Museum of Art once again for our Petal Pop-Ups! These fun floral dreamscapes are created to build excitement and momentum ahead of SDMA’s annual Art Alive event and fundraiser, bringing gorgeous blooms to iconic spots around San Diego. Have you wondered how Native Poppy’s team creates these amazing installs? After four years of creating these floral installs for SDMA, we’re excited to share how our floral designs come to life for our 2026 Petal Pop-Ups.
Natalie Gill, founder of Native Poppy, leads the floral design team for each Petal Pop-Up. From choosing the location and communicating the vision, to coordinating with our wholesaler for donated flowers, to making sure we have the right team to bring the installation to life, Natalie guides the design. She’s especially passionate about this project after her stint as the featured Art Alive rotunda designer in 2023!
Margaret Roche, Native Poppy’s Farm Manager and Event Operations Lead, is the logistics counterpart for Petal Pop-Ups, helping engineer and mechanically make the installations work. She packs our tools, thinks through the design ahead of time, and ensures we have any specialty or out-of-the-box mechanics we might need. This year, she’s taking on an even bigger role, managing communication with venues and the team so that when we arrive, everything is ready. That way, our floral designers can focus fully on the design. It’s a beautiful partnership.
In 2025, we hosted Petal Pop-Ups at Liberty Public Market, Del Mar, Otay Ranch Town Center, and the historic Hotel Del Coronado – as we prepare for the (super secret) 2026 Petal Pop-Ups, we’re reflecting on how our team creates these gorgeous floral installations!
When you toured prospective locations for 2026 Petal Pop-Ups, how did you dream up the floral installation designs?
Natalie: Location, location, location!!!
First, it has to be an iconic San Diego place. Second, the Petal Pop-Up inside that space needs to create an iconic photo moment. Third, we need to figure out the structure to which we can actually attach flowers.
I’m also thinking about the logistics. How will our team of four to six florists show up at 7 a.m. and build this in less than four hours? Can our team easily access the area around the installation? How do we get a large volume of flowers into the space?
The design also has to scale appropriately. Big enough to feel magical, but not so large that it becomes impossible to build in a morning. Basically, it has to hit the sweet spot.
A good example was our Petal Pop-Up at Belmont Park in 2023. There were a lot of places we could have done an installation, but the carousel just made sense — it’s iconic, and with the roller coaster in the background it created a really fun setting for flowers.
When we did a Petal Pop-Up on the Star of India in 2024, you needed a ticket to go on the ship to see the installation. So we also created a smaller floral moment on the ticket booth outside so everyone could experience a little bit of the flowers, even if they weren’t going onboard.
The San Diego Museum of Art has always been incredibly supportive and lets me choose locations that feel inspiring. From there, I work closely with the venue to make sure we’re protecting the property and that the installation is accessible for everyone.
How do you translate your creative sketches of the floral install into a design plan?
Natalie: One of the fun things about the 2026 Petal Pop-Ups is that, unlike a client event or wedding, we have complete creative freedom. We do digital renderings and sketches ahead of time, mostly to communicate with the venue so they know what to expect, can prep their teams, and plan for crowds to descend for their selfies with the installations.
The sketches also help my team think through the installation: how we’ll attach flowers, what mechanics we’ll use, and the general scale of the design. Our flowers are donated by Cali Wholesale, so we try to remain flexible with exactly what flowers we’ll receive – we might get different varieties, colors, and textures than we imagine.
So when we’re on site, the installation rarely matches the rendering exactly. The digital drawing is just a jumping-off point, helping us plan scale and attachment points while leaving plenty of room to let the flowers guide the design in the moment.
What type of mechanics are used to shape the Petal Pop-Ups? Are there any “secrets” you can share in going foam-free for a more sustainable approach?
Natalie: This is one of the hardest parts of making a Petal Pop-Up. We’re always conflicted – trying to be as environmentally friendly as possible, but also creating these suspended, magical-looking designs. Flowers in direct sunlight for three days need a lot of water, and disguising those larger mechanics? Nearly impossible.
We try to attach reusable containers to columns or light poles (when the space allows) so stems can drink plenty of water during the three day pop-ups. We’ve even hidden buckets inside fountains to hold large amounts of flowers. But when we’re doing delicate, suspended installations, sometimes it’s just impossible to avoid foam.
At most weddings and events, flowers only need to last six hours, so dainty mechanics like soaked moss in a chicken-wire ball or tiny water tubes work perfectly. But for multi-day Petal Pop-Ups? Yeah… not so much.
We’re trying our best, honey.
Margaret: We’ve done a decent amount of trial and error over the years, plus learned lots from the generous floral community. A couple tricks we employ include using moss poles and shoe box sized tupperware, and kitchen drawer liners. Using moss poles (like those you can find in garden nurseries for giving house plants structure) create fun shapes that can still hold pops of flowers and greenery.
We’ll also use plastic bins, filled with pebbles for weight and chicken wire for structure, to create a large base foam-free vessel that can still hold structure for the stems and give them plenty of drinking water. These are best for the bases of columns or lightpoles or areas where we’re covering some literal ground. We’ll use rubber kitchen liners as a barrier when we need to create a little extra grip on something like a light post or if we want to be extra careful to avoid scuffing part of the architecture with our floral mechanics.
What are the essential items in your toolkit that people might be surprised to see? You guys make it look so easy!
Natalie: Zip ties… so many zip ties. Margaret packs our supplies and tool kits – take it away Marg.
Margaret: We arrive with a plan, a rendering, a vision. But sometimes the reality is that we’re setting up during a 90 degree heatwave in March. Sometimes, we can’t attach how we thought. So we pack with this in mind: we might have to pivot based on the conditions we find when we arrive. Because of the scale of each petal pop up and we are usually creating a tall visual photo ready moment, our pack lists are decently standard. Yes, lots and lots of zipties. All our options for foam-free mechanics: funeral cones, chicken wire, water tubes, tupperware, pebbles, ladders, step ladders, moss poles, 30# fishing line, tarps, snips, pop-up trash cans, big brooms and industrial sized dust pans (got to clean up quickly with such a short timeline to get them photo ready!). For the extra hot days, we pack floral foam as a “just in case” back up.
What does the behind-the-scenes coordination look like to get a full team of florists and thousands of stems to an iconic San Diego location before the sun comes up?
Natalie: Technically we don’t arrive at the venue before the sun comes up, but we do start really early. We wake up before sunrise to get to the warehouse, load the vans with flowers, and head to the location. First things first, we always treat ourselves to a coffee – an essential.
A few months out, the Native Poppy team can sign up for the four secret Petal Pop-Up locations. It’s such a fun way for everyone to do something different, and for many of our teammates, it’s one of their favorite weekends of the year. Even folks from non-floral departments; admin, management, and sales jump in to help, because it’s just that much fun.
Although one year, it started pouring rain, which turned into really heavy hail. We all ran to a coffee shop to hide under the awning, but eventually had to go back and finish the installation, freezing and soaking wet. Not exactly fun at the time, but somehow we were all still laughing. Definitely memorable.
Why is it important to bring free and accessible art to the San Diego community through this partnership with SDMA?
Natalie: Our company mission is to share love through the power of flowers. We do that every day by delivering arrangements that are messages of love from our community to one another, and by showing up as a happy, positive voice in the world, for our team and our customers.
Petal Pop-Ups take that a step further. These installations aren’t for a private event or wedding, they’re for everyone. Flowers have this amazing ability to create joy, and seeing a beautiful, unexpected floral display in a secret location, just for fun and to promote the San Diego Museum of Art, is something really special.
The fact that it’s free, for the community, and surprise makes it even more meaningful. It’s an honor to be part of, and I hope we can keep doing it for many years to come.
