About Us
“We have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us.” -Pericles (Thuc. II. 41)
Explore the beauty of plants and their significance in our lives, showcasing their mythological, medicinal, and cultural roles in history and today
We strive to bring visions to life for our clients, setting up spaces with life and nature for any event or occasion, providing services, rentals, purchases, and decor.
Garnet Ryu
How it Started
Over the years, the meaning of the word “stride” has changed. Time obscured its true etymology, but different cultures diversified its use. In some countries, the root word meant “to mount” or “to struggle,” and in some cases “to fight.” It’s only in more recent years that it’s come to mean a long, purposeful stride forward. And there’s a strange truth to the progression of this word, one that says something about the action itself.
Because every step you take comes with resistance, force, and juxtaposition, and when you drive forward, the path you create disappears behind you, only existing in the form of your drive, trajectory, and momentum. But this intangible force impacts those around you. The more you drive forward, the further your path, creating monuments in the form of drive, moments you can never touch but that can be felt, in streams and waves. Life is fundamentally a force, not a fact.
I think this is often clearest to see in plants and their interactions with human culture, since this relation is both straightforward and long-standing, each plant species creating a kind of case study for how characters perpetuate themselves through their own unique forces of will. This is the concept that Stridena is built from.
About the Founder
When I was younger, I used to go into the forest alone, to collect the berries and fallen leaves.
My goal was to capture the colours and the intricacies of different plants in that single moment. I’d press them carefully between the pages of an old notebook, hoping that when I opened it again, I could relive the vivid gradients, the way colours bled into the veins. Whether it was in the cold, the rain, or the dim of dying streetlights, I found excitement in the idea of saving something beautiful.
But when I returned to those pages, I was always disappointed. The colours were muted, the rounded shapes warped. Something essential was always lost, and it was impossible to capture what made nature feel alive.
Around the same time, I was experimenting with tomato plants and root-knot nematodes, reading books about oak trees, and watching old videos about moving (mimosa pudica and the telegraph plant), deadly (the tree nettle and hemlock), and life-saving plants. To my family’s dismay, I grew an exceeding number of plants all around the home (trailing crumbs of dirt on the floor), helping each member of my eclectic collection grow. Experiencing the process of plants was fascinating to me, because I was the kind of person who would always get swept away by potential.
And all of this, I did alone.
Not because I was socially cynical—but because I was extremely optimistic. I wanted to believe the world was an extraordinary and remunerating place, and I often fell into a singular, bull-headed rut of actualizing the potential of different goals, people, and ideas, regardless of the cost.
But when I pushed that energy outwards, I was often met with loss.
I wanted to believe the world was a place of enrichment and community, and to preserve that belief in the face of the contrary, I often decided to do things alone. And alone, I decided to study plants.
Yet, I learned that plants that adapted over millenia to thrive through their respective environmental hardships, developing unique qualities that have become extremely notable in human culture, weaving themselves into mythology, symbology, history, and medicine. And in the process of interacting with practical and abstract concepts in societies around the world, plants are not merely useful to our communities. They’re proof that the persistence to grow and force your own path in life builds and expands upon itself, and this energy you create compounds on itself exponentially, pushing you and the people around you forward. And this force is both entirely intangible and extremely impactful.
Life, born through effort, pain, and persistence, cannot be pressed into a page. It lives and breathes and changes. It’s a force you create as you define yourself in the face of fear or heartbreak. That energy, once created, doesn’t just stay with you. It radiates. It connects.
And over time, I’ve learned that the energy the forest gave me—the feeling I once tried to keep for myself—isn’t meant to be kept at all. It’s meant to be shared. And I hope you can share it, too.