A florist specifically requires knowledge of plants and flowers — their characteristics, their seasonality, their care requirements — and the design skill to create arrangements that serve the aesthetic and emotional purposes for which flowers are given and displayed.

For someone with the observational mind of an inventor, the flower shop was probably also a kind of laboratory — a place where the physical world presented itself for close observation, where the properties of materials (plants, stems, wire, ribbon, foam, water) were experienced directly and repeatedly, and where problem-solving was a daily necessity.

The operational challenges of running a flower shop — managing perishable inventory, coordinating deliveries for time-sensitive events, maintaining customer relationships — are not the same as the challenges of invention, but they call on related forms of practical intelligence.

Mary Kenner chose to run a flower shop as her livelihood, which suggests that the work was not merely endured but engaged with.