In the humid haze of an early summer morning, Ash Hobson Carr walks up and down rows of snapdragons and delphiniums, expertly snipping long stems of bright blooms. On the 6 acres in Highland Springs that she shares cooperatively with two other farming enterprises, Hobson Carr’s Hazel Witch Farm flower business is blooming.
So is Jenny and Paul Maloney’s Wind Haven Farm in King William County, where Jenny’s love of flowers went from a front-yard garden 10 years ago to a thriving wholesale flower business on an 11-acre farm with 7 acres in production.
“When I first got into [the local wholesale flower market], there was just me and one other guy,” Jenny Maloney says. “Now there are a slew of people selling wholesale. It has exploded in the last 10 years.”
“We are constantly out there harvesting,” says Britton Barbee, who with her husband, Walter, runs Prospect Hill Flower Farm, producing flowers on about 2 acres of an old cattle farm in Louisa County. “I was surprised at the demand.”
From Bumpass to Williamsburg, from Mechanicsville to Powhatan, everything’s coming up … well, not roses, but dahlias, cosmos and zinnias as flower farmers reclaim a beautiful business.
Once flower farms in the United States were prolific, particularly in California. Then, in 1991, the U.S. implemented the Andean Trade Act, which removed tariffs for 13 years on South American agricultural products. The intent was to limit coca farming, the key ingredient in cocaine, in Colombia and create jobs in a country ravaged by civil war.
The U.S. is still the world’s largest consumer of cut flowers. But now most of those blooms come from Colombia. It’s the largest producer of cut flowers in the world, exporting more than 660 million stems in 2020.
U.S. flower farmers suffered another blow when the United States signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992, eliminating trade barriers with Canada and Mexico. “The trade agreement made it cheaper to ship in cut flowers from outside the United States than to get them from inside the U.S. Tons of large commercial flower farms went under or moved abroad,” Jenny Maloney says.
As the local food movement has grown in the U.S. and consumers are becoming more aware of the environmental and financial costs of a global food system, American flower farms are making a comeback. Flowers can be grown almost anywhere and require less gardening space than vegetables.
“My first garden was a terra-cotta pot garden. I had a big window but no access to outside space,” says Hobson Carr, who left a career as a globe-trotting photographer to settle into her passion for flowers and medicinal herbs. “Then we moved into a row house in the Fan, and I filled the backyard. I used raise beds and wicking gardens, because I was keen on growing Western medicinal herbs and didn’t want the soil toxicity. My husband had grandparents in Varina, and I planted a garden in their yard.”
She describes her flower quest as “a slow hobby that became a rabbit hole I fell down.”
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Rachel Williamson of Wind Haven Farm (Photo by Claire Fortier)
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Poppies at the River City Flower Exchange (Photo by Emily Richardson)
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Rachel Watman of Swann’s End Flowers in Powhatan (Photo by Claire Fortier)
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Golden yarrow (Photo by Claire Fortier)
The same is true for Jenny Maloney. During the 2008 recession, she couldn’t find a job that utilized her art degree from VCU, so she went to work for her in-laws at their vegetable farm. She found her calling in blooms. “I sort of gravitated toward the flowers, probably because of my art degree,” she says. “I love the colors and textures. They are just beautiful. They speak to me.”
“Mom and Dad decided not to grow flowers anymore,” Paul Maloney says. “They weren’t making enough money and needed the ground for other things. Jenny didn’t want to do just vegetables. She was kind of a mess [without her flowers], so I said we could till the front yard.”
“Little by little, we filled up every little sunshiny spot,” Jenny Maloney says. “Then we cleared trees and got even more sunshiny spots. Paul’s brother said there were a couple of acres that they weren’t using at their house. We filled up their whole backyard and then their whole side yard, every inch of their property. Then we decided that was probably a little too much.”
For Barbee, the planning was more methodical. “We started in 2015. My husband is Bolivian, and we moved back to the U.S. from Bolivia. We both grew up on farms. We knew we wanted to farm, so we did a lot of research before purchasing property. We wanted to maintain and preserve farmland and grow sustainably. We don’t use chemicals on our farm. ... We want to protect the flora and fauna and create an environment that is positive for them. You are in this for the long term, and that means being a steward of the land.”
Justine and Aaron McFarland of Tupelo Farm & Garden in Urbanna were organic farmers with Walker Farm in Vermont, which has operated since 1770, evolving into a horticultural destination for flower lovers. Justine managed eight of the farm’s more than 20 greenhouses before she and Aaron relocated to Richmond for a job and started their own farm in 2019. “We were astonished at the variety we could grow.”
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and “it was the perfect storm” for flower farming, Justine McFarland says. “Gardening gives people a chance to be outside, to dig in the dirt and reconnect with the earth’s beauty and bounty.” Suddenly gardening, particularly flower farming, became a huge hobby.
“I needed to do something that brought some joy and beauty into such an ugly, hate-filled world of COVID,” says Rachael Watman, who with her husband, Max, owns Swann’s End Flowers in Powhatan. “I started growing flowers until I had more flowers than I could fill my house with, so I put something on Facebook and started having people come to the end of the driveway to pick up little arrangements I made. Going into the second year, I decided I couldn’t do it at the end of the driveway. I’m far out here. So, I started doing weekly subscriptions.”
She garnered the interest of members of the Powhatan Chamber of Commerce, which led to an in-town pickup spot, introduction to local businesses who would carry her bouquets and connections with local farmers markets. While she still works her day job as the vice president of programs of The Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation, Watman finds creativity and community in the flower world.
In addition to launching flower farms large and small, the pandemic also laid bare the flaws with overseas flowers and the diversity of locally grown flowers. “When COVID happened, wholesale houses had to shut down, flowers weren’t getting shipped, and florists had a hard time sourcing flowers,” says Jenny Maloney. “My clients started sourcing more from us.”
“With the shipping and transit getting bad, the quality of the flowers that designers were getting was worse,” says Paul Maloney. “Now more customers are actually looking for local, and that’s driving our growth.”
Claire Smith of River City Flower Exchange helps Renato Seixas unload flowers from Sweet Greens Farm in Scottsville. (Photo by Emily Richardson)
River City Flower Exchange is a testament to the burgeoning business of locally grown flowers. It was started in 2019 by Jenn Henry, a floral designer who runs Field Day Creative, and Amanda Montgomery, who started growing flowers in the front yard of her Bon Air home before expanding her Hummingbird Flower Co. to Beaverdam. From Montgomery’s living room to a shop in Scott’s Addition, the business has evolved into a grower-owned cooperative and Central Virginia’s first all-local flower market.
“In agriculture, you eventually end up bumping shoulders with other farmers. To succeed, collaboration and cooperation are much better than competition. Our goal is to lift up our local flower farming industry,” says McFarland, an original member and vice president of the exchange.
“On any given weekend, you can’t move in here,” says Claire Smith, manager of River City Flower Exchange, as she unloads buckets of flowers from one of the 11 flower farms that are part of the exchange. It’s her job to take in flowers on Mondays and Tuesdays, sort them by orders, and have them ready to be picked up by florists, event planners and floral designers on Wednesday and Thursday mornings. The exchange is open to the public from noon to 2 p.m. on Wednesdays and Thursdays and from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays. They also offer workshops on floral and herb-related topics.
“The exchange has gone from being a pet project to now in its the second year at Scotts Addition,” says Hobson Carr, president of the exchange. “We got a grant from the USDA, a specialty crop grant that historically hasn’t been connected with flowers. That allowed us to build out our marketing material and fill out our workshops. We have doubled our sales, and we are 25% larger than last year.”
The grant also allowed the exchange to open a drop-off spot in Williamsburg, with aspirations to open more. The hope is to get more floral designers and retail outlets to give local flowers a chance.
“Flowers just give people joy,” says Jenny Maloney. “You celebrate all these major life events with flowers — weddings but also funerals. You celebrate someone’s life with flowers.” —Claire Fortier
Jeffrey Bright examines one of hundreds of thousands of daylilies on his grandfather’s Lucks Lane farm. (Photo by Claire Fortier)
Natural Selection
A hobby run wild, Bright Acres Daylilies boasts thousands of its namesake blooms
“I know I want this to mean something,” Jeffrey Bright says of his grandfather’s 10-acre daylily farm. A quiet enclave off Lucks Lane in Chesterfield County, Bright Acres Daylilies boasts over 200,000 plants across 3,000 varieties. Among them are more than 120 registered breeds of daylily.
It’s a 30-plus-year family affair — Bright was “born and raised” at Bright Acres and has worked around the farm since childhood. Now, he studies horticulture technology at Reynolds Community College.
Bright Acres was originally the retirement plan of Bright’s grandfather, who did not want to be named for this story, and retired chemist John Paine. Their partnership was perfect at first — Paine was interested in hybridizing daylilies, and Bright’s grandfather had the land to grow them. Together, they crossbred countless varieties. But Bright’s grandfather couldn’t bear to throw away the many random lilies created, so he planted them around the property. In addition, he removed Paine’s metal tags denoting the registered varieties because they interfered with his equipment.
The partnership eventually dissolved, and although his grandfather still lives on the farm and loves his lilies dearly, Bright has taken on a larger role over the past seven years.
In particular, he has the arduous task of identifying the lilies with the help of Paine’s map of the land, in the form of a spreadsheet. “I’ve got the maps, and when I finally cracked the code, I felt like [computer science pioneer and World War II codebreaker] Alan Turing,” Bright says. Although some notations only refer to certain flowers by unintelligible codes, others had actual names, which helped Bright track them down. “I know where they are, in theory,” he says. “In practice, we’re waiting for different things to bloom.”
Bright has already identified most varieties — among them, “Custard’s Last Stand,” “Burns All Day,” “Watermelon Tourmaline” and “Crepe Suzette” — but one remains, ironically named “Bone of Contention.” It’s a pink flower in a row of all-pink flowers, so Bright must determine where one breed ends and the other begins. The task requires attention to detail, as some plots grow a variety of cultivars, only one or two of which might be registered with the American Daylily Society, and each has a unique internal clock. Bright says it plays out a lot like a game of Battleship.
He markets “Mystery Lilies” for those who want unique plants and don’t mind the lack of a brand name. While registered or named varieties of lily are more popular with distributors and customers, and fetch a higher price, there is much that can be done with nonspecified varieties.
The other thing that limits sales of daylilies is that they are daylilies: They bloom and then die within a day. They are tough to sell to florists, but Bright has other ideas. He describes potential partnerships with local restaurants, who might accept a shipment of daylilies in the morning to decorate tables, then discard them at night when the flowers close and die. Daylily petals are also edible, making them an ideal drink garnish, Bright says.
“My grandfather enjoys sharing color with others,” Bright says. “It’d be great if we could keep that going for years to come.” —Emily Richardson
