Heather’s Way: Why Argyle’s Heather King went from arranging flowers to rebuilding lives

For years, Heather King’s Ardmore and Haverford flower shops helped the Main Line mark life’s biggest moments — weddings, birthdays, babies and funerals.

But behind Argyle’s flowers and French buckets, another kind of enterprise – equally lovely – was quietly taking place. Young people in early recovery from addiction kept finding their way to Heather.

One needed a job.

Another needed a place to stay.

Another simply needed someone who believed he wasn’t beyond saving.

Long before Heather King officially launched her nonprofit, Heather’s Way, the back rooms of Argyle had become an unofficial refuge for young people trying to rebuild their lives.

So when Heather closed her shop in January 2024, she wasn’t walking away from her life’s work. She was stepping fully into it.

In 2020, when Heather’s fledgling nonprofit board was debating names, one founding member joked: “If we don’t call it Heather’s Way, we should call it Taylor’s Fault.”

In a manner of speaking, it was.

Heather embarked on her mission because of her husband’s long and painful battle with alcoholism — a battle that nearly destroyed their marriage and upended her young family.

When Heather Resnick first met Taylor in Park City, Utah, she was a single mom in her mid-20s and he was a personable, party-hard former ski racer.

“Park City was a party town,” Taylor recalls. “I was working and skiing and drinking and I had lots of good friends. I thought I was doing well.” As Heather puts it, “Everyone was drinking but Taylor was always drinking more.”

When the couple married and moved back to Heather’s hometown of Berwyn, the hard daily drinking followed.

“I was a little depressed when we moved to the Main Line,” Taylor says. “I didn’t like my job and I didn’t have friends. So I just met people that liked to drink and I drank with them.”

He pivoted from finance to commercial real estate, but that only amplified the problem.

“It’s a pretty heavy drinking industry,” he says. “Every activity in my life was plus booze — golf, volleyball, movies, après-ski, soccer, just hanging out.”

Looking back, Taylor calls himself a high-functioning alcoholic. He worked. He socialized. He showed up.

But over time, the warning signs mounted.

DUIs and totaled cars.

Angry outbursts.

A son scared to bring friends home.

An increasingly strained marriage.

Still, nothing changed until Taylor’s third DUI near Media, when he stranded the couple’s 11-year-old at the airport after dark and lost his license for 14 months.

That was Heather’s breaking point.

She gave her husband an ultimatum: fully commit to recovery — or lose the marriage.

What followed were two years of lies, false starts and broken promises.

While claiming sobriety, Taylor was filling Deer Park water bottles with vodka and swapping nonalcoholic beer for the real thing. On and off, he would try a 12-step meeting or two but found them “bleak and depressing.”

Eventually, he found a sponsor who understood him and meetings that resonated.

Now 54, Taylor hasn’t had a drink in 17 years.

“No more road rage, blowups at work, getting pissed on the phone and throwing it against the windshield,” he says.

He still attends daily 12-step meetings. Heather still attends Al-Anon.

“If I drink again, I’ll know I’ll lose everything in my life that I love and value,” Taylor says. “I’ll hurt everyone who loves me most. I’ll be dead in a gutter — or in jail.”

Their marriage, once glacial with resentment, slowly healed. This July, the Kings will celebrate their 28th wedding anniversary.

Four years into Taylor’s recovery, Heather received a phone call that would alter the trajectory of her own life.

The leasing agent for Suburban Square wanted to know if she’d be interested in opening a flower stall in Ardmore Farmers Market.

Three weeks later, Argyle was born. “I didn’t even have a business plan,” Heather recalls.

What began as a creative outlet for a stay-at-home mom soon evolved into something bigger.

That evolution began with a young man we’ll call “T.”

About a year after opening Argyle, Taylor told Heather he was worried about his sponsor’s teenage son, who had been arrested during his freshman year of college for dealing drugs and was awaiting trial at home on the Main Line.

Angry, directionless and in early recovery from substance abuse disorder, T needed structure.

Heather hired him immediately.

“It was the least I could do,” she says. “His father had saved my husband’s life.”

After T was convicted and placed on work release, he commuted six or seven days a week — by bus, train and bicycle — from Montgomery County Correctional Facility to his job in Ardmore.

A lost teen became a grateful young man eager to pick up the pieces and return to college. To this day, Heather considers T her fourth child.

Three weeks after serving out his sentence, T connected Heather with another young man struggling through recovery.

Heather hired him, too.

Then another.

Then another.

Over the next seven years, Heather employed 27 young men in early sobriety at Argyle and informally mentored countless others.

In the back rooms of the flower shop, she offered young people something they didn’t have: stability. Heather became their surrogate mom, someone who refused to give up on them.

Sometimes that meant a home-cooked meal.

Sometimes a temporary bed in her Wayne home.

Often it meant helping navigate sober living homes, treatment programs or simply the terrifying logistics of starting over.

“Argyle became known as the public place you could go and ask for help without asking for help,” Heather says. “Someone would come in and [my team] would roll their eyes because they knew I was going to disappear for the next hour.”

When COVID hit, Heather decided to formalize what she had already been doing. She launched Heather’s Way, a nonprofit dedicated to helping young adults in recovery find stable sober living and support during the fragile earliest stages of sobriety.

The nonprofit helps fund placements in vetted sober living homes — housing that is rarely covered by insurance and is sometimes sketchy.

“It’s still the Wild West out there,” Heather says. “Anybody can buy a house and throw a manager in there and do whatever they want. They’re taking advantage of people who are incredibly vulnerable.”

Early recovery, she says, is often the most dangerous and lonely phase.

“A lot of people are coming out of jail, rehab or psych wards with nowhere safe to land,” she says. “Families may have detached with love. Trust has been broken. I never want someone to feel like nobody is looking out for them.”

In just six years, Heather’s Way has raised an eye-popping $1.3 million and helped more than 600 young people pursue lasting recovery through sober living support and mentorship.

Next on her vision board: a partnership with another local nonprofit, Be Part of the Conversation, to educate families with loved ones in recovery about substance abuse disorder.

On May 20, about 50 women will gather in the garden of Heather’s Wayne home for an upscale ladies luncheon and shopping benefit. Another Heather’s Way golf outing will follow this fall.

For years, Heather King was known as the woman behind some of the Main Line’s most breathtaking bouquets.

Turns out, the most important thing she was cultivating wasn’t flowers. It was hope.

Heather King will host “In Full Bloom” – a women’s luncheon and shopping benefit for Heather’s Way – at her Wayne home on May 20. The 2026 Heather’s Way Invitational golf tournament is set for Monday, Oct. 5 at Bluestone Country Club in Blue Bell. For more information, visit www.heathersway.org. Heather King can be reached at Heather@heathersway.org.