“Florets Farm’s Cut Flower Garden” is an excellent handbook to creating and running a very successful cut flower business on the model of Floret Farm in Washington’s Skagit Valley. However, if your goals are not quite so ambitious, there is still a lot of advice here for creating a cutting patch in your own garden and using the bounty for filling vases and many other purposes.
Primary author Erin Benzakein speaks from a lot of experience. Her farm began as a big patch of sweet peas, grown in memory of her beloved, gardening great-grandmother. Friends requested cut flowers. The tears and emotional memories evoked in one recipient was an epiphany for Benzakein. “In that moment, I realized that I’d found my calling. Witnessing the profound impact that a simple bouquet could have on a person, I knew I had discovered something worth pursuing.”
While the introduction prepares the reader for both the cultural and business side of cut flowers, the core of the book is the author’s choices of favorites and her hard-earned experience with each. And not just flowers. She encourages growing at least as many plants for their leaves, seed pods, colorful branches, and other features as supporting cast – or stars in their own right – for your arrangements. She also encourages the use of grasses, shrubs, trees, and even vegetables in your cutting plans; a spray of tomatoes – in various stages of ripeness – has considerable ornamental value.
To this end, there is an introduction to all the equipment familiar to a florist. Many of these are useful to the home arranger for various projects involving both fresh and dried flowers. The most striking photo (and there are many) in the book is of the author wearing a spring crown of ranunculus, viburnum, muscari, and campanula!
Excerpted from the Fall 2017 Arboretum Bulletin.