After graduating from Harvard medical school with top marks, no one expected Phil Van Huynh to end up as a florist. Least of all Van Huynh himself.
Phil Van Huynh is an enigma.
One moment he’s gregarious, recounting a story with breathless excitement, and the next he’s serious and contemplative. It’s as though two selves exist within him.
The present self is Phil the florist, a warm and talented artist who creates spectacular floral arrangements for jack-of-all-sustainable-trades Joost Bakker. The former self was Dr Van Huynh, medical practitioner at NewYork–Presbyterian, one of the world’s busiest hospitals.
“I absolutely loved being a doctor, I didn’t leave medicine because I hated it,” says Van Huynh, who graduated third in his class at Harvard. “I just found something I loved even more.”
Growing up in Taylors Lakes in Melbourne’s west, Van Huynh always had something of a green thumb. Weekends were spent helping his grandfather, who worked as a gardener after emigrating from Vietnam.
Even years later, on summer breaks from medical school in Boston, he’d fly to California to lend a hand on a friend’s organic farm. He’d send photos from the fields back to his mentor at Harvard, a professor who later became his boss at the hospital.
The watershed came in 2012, when he travelled home to Melbourne to help with another friend’s wedding. Not only was he the best man but he also took on styling the entire event, including the flowers.
It was then he met florist Katie Marx. She took Van Huynh under her wing, bringing him along to the exclusive flower markets and lending him her studio space.
“I was supposed to fly back to the States the day after the wedding, but never having done a wedding before, not realising how much work was involved, I was absolutely knackered,” he chuckles.
“I changed my flight and decided to stay in Melbourne for a week longer. That’s when Katie told me about another wedding she was doing.”
One wedding became two, which became another rescheduled flight. By February, Van Huynh knew he had to resign his prestigious job at NewYork–Presbyterian. He gave notice. His boss, the professor from Harvard he’d long idolised, refused to accept it.
“He told me, ‘If you want to resign you have to fly back to New York and do it face-to-face’,” Van Huynh says. “He wasn’t too surprised I was resigning, he just thought it would happen a lot later in life.”
The decision did come as a surprise, however, to many people close to him. Van Hyunh says, in a way, he even surprised himself.
“My parents freaked out, but they came around,” Van Huynh recalls. “It took a couple of months, but I think they saw how happy I was.”
Van Huynh first met Joost Bakker in 2010, just a few months after he’d lost his grandfather. In 2013, Marx introduced the two again on Bakker's farm in Monbulk. Soon after, they began working together.
From the start, Van Huynh was in awe of the way Bakker approached his craft. The pair now spend days foraging for foliage or on the farm in Monbulk where most of their flowers are grown. In a way he’s come full circle, back to the earth he once worked with his grandfather as a boy.
So how does he reconcile these two selves – the doctor and the artist? Van Huynh admits he struggles. There are times he misses being a doctor, and rarely a day goes by that he doesn't think about New York.
“I’ve always gone back to natural elements, so I think being a florist just satisfied me on a deeper level,” he says. “Even at the flower market, everything is kind of too perfect. All the flowers are cut to the same height, you don't get any gnarly, wild foliage.
“That's why if you want it, you have to go out and seek it for yourself.”
Images by Alan Weedon.
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