Marni Martin-McTavishSupplied
Marni Martin-McTavish still lives on the Huntsville, Ont., farm where she grew up.
The property, which has been in her family for almost four decades, is a bucolic place of rolling hills and verdant fields – perfect for the textile artist, who has always found inspiration in the rugged beauty of the surrounding Muskoka landscape. She loved weaving natural, hand-dyed fibres in her art, but during COVID, she felt restless – it wasn’t filling her soul. Then she came across a book about flower farming by Lisa Mason Ziegler, filled with beautiful photographs of cut flowers.
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“I thought, I could do this,” says Martin-McTavish. She took Ziegler’s online gardening courses, bought some seeds and started planting them indoors in her studio. Four years later, her family farm is now Indigo Rain Flower Farm, where she grows thousands of flowers and turns them into season-inspired bouquets. “This opportunity presented itself at just the right time in my life. I was ready for change. It is exhausting work, but it is life-giving too. It resonates deeply within me.”
Heidi Brautigam holds a fresh picked collection of flowers at Stems Flowers Farm. After working in a career in sales in Toronto, she and her husband bought an eight-acre property in Cookstown, Ont., where the family-owned business grows 70 varieties of species on 2.5 acres.Supplied
She is not the only one. Her small business is just one of hundreds of new flower farms sprouting up across North America – almost all female-led.
Debra Prinzing, founder of the Seattle-based Slow Flowers Society, says the seasonal flower movement – not just on this continent but around the globe – is being powered by women who are reshaping what a traditional flower farm used to be. “The appeal to women is obvious,” she says. “You can make a living by growing off a quarter of an acre, or less, in your own yard. You can start without a lot of infrastructure, so it has a low-cost entry point.”
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“And these boutique microfarms can accommodate a woman’s busy life, whether that is caring for elderly parents or young children,” says Prinzing, a flower farmer herself, and author of two books, The 50 Mile Bouquet and Slow Flowers.
“These women come from all walks of life. Some live in rural areas, others in big cities. It can be a full-time, or a part-time gig. I recently met a policewoman who started growing dahlias in her backyard to help ease stress related to her day job.”
For a long time, women who wanted to work with flowers became florists. Flower farming wasn’t considered a feasible option in the male-dominated world of commercial growing. Then in the early 2010s, the slow-flower movement – a philosophy similar to the slow-food movement, encouraging consumers to purchase stems grown locally, seasonally and ethically – started to gain momentum.
Fresh picked dahlias.Supplied
“Just as people started becoming more interested in who was growing their food, there was budding interest to know the farmers who were cultivating flowers too,” says Prinzing, adding that local, sustainably grown flowers do far less harm to the environment than imported ones, which are typically mass produced, chemical-laden and shipped thousands of miles, leaving a large carbon footprint.
The rise of small-scale flower farms created a space where women could tap into their passion for nature and build ventures where their lifestyles and values aligned. A decade ago, the flexibility of this business model captured the imagination of entrepreneur Heidi Brautigam, too.
In the early 2010s, Brautigam was working in sales in Toronto, struggling to do a job she wasn’t crazy about while raising four young children. She began to grow flowers in her tiny backyard in Newmarket – loved it – and was soon “squeaking more plants in around the playground equipment.”
Flowers grow under sunny skies at Indigo Rain Flower Farm near Huntsville, Ont.Supplied
Within a couple of years, she decided she wanted to flower farm, full-time. She and her husband, Kevin, bought an eight-acre property in Cookstown, Ont. Today, the family business, Stems Flower Farm, grows 70 varieties of species on 2.5 acres (sold at an on-farm market), and offers 1,000 different seed varieties online to customers across Canada.
“I feel, in life, there are so many things that are one-size fits all and sometimes people struggle to fit into that box,” says Brautigam. “With flower farming there is no box. You can grow on any size land. If you have a couple of small beds, you can sell from the end of your driveway. You can make it be whatever is best for you, your family and your situation. There are no hard and fast rules.”
It is difficult to quantify just how much the female-led flower farm sector has grown because so many of the smaller micro-operators are not registered with any governing bodies such as Prinzing’s Slow Flowers Society (which is holding its first international conference in Banff, Alta., this June) or the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers (ASCFG), also based in the U.S.
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Sarah Kistner, the Canadian representative for the 2,750-member ASCFG, estimates that since 2013, her group’s membership has grown roughly 10 per cent a year. During the pandemic, however, that number exploded and the ASCFG membership grew 50 per cent, seemingly overnight. It has since levelled off to pre-COVID levels, a readjustment Kistner attributes to many first-time flower farmers realizing that tending to plants, and selling them, is hard.
“Unequivocally, I love what I do, especially seeing people’s faces light up when they see our beautiful flowers,” says Kistner, who runs Stone Meadow Gardens with her husband, Carl, in Granville Ferry, N.S. “However, I have come to realize that many of the things I love most about this job are also what can make it so challenging.
Sarah Kistner and her husband Carl stand among flowers grown on their farm, Stone Meadow Gardens in in Granville Ferry, N.S..Charlotte Truant/Supplied
“I love working outdoors, but that also means that I need to take the cold, rainy days working the mud alongside the perfect blue-sky days. I love that I’m never bored, but that also means that I need a lot of different skill sets,” adds Kistner, whose farm is known for its high-quality dahlia tubers, which they ship across Canada.
Her biggest precaution for newbies is to remember that growing the flowers is only a small part of the job. “Although we all romanticize that part, the reality is quite different. Not only do you need to learn about soil health and pest management, but you also need to be good at bookkeeping and office administration. You have to wear a lot of different hats to be successful.”
Martin-McTavish agrees the learning curve is steep. However, if she encounters a problem that has her stumped, she turns to her fellow farmer florists (many are on the popular Facebook page Canadian Fresh Flower Farmers) who always help her figure it out.
“I’ve found that I’m never alone on this journey,” says the weaver-turned-horticulturalist, who adds she could not do the work without the support of her husband, Ian, her parents and her two grown kids.
“Being a good flower grower is like being a parent. You’re constantly monitoring and watching over your crop to make sure it’s okay – just like you do your children. It’s a business that was made for women. Nurturing is something many of us feel called to do.”