Flowers Camp Reflections from Ellen Frost
Greetings, flower friends!
What a gorgeous week it’s been; we absolutely love fake fall here on the farm.
We’re back with another guest writer for this week’s newsletter. Ellen Frost, owner of Local Color Flowers, is a champion of the local flower movement, and we’re eternally grateful to have her as both a customer and a friend. Ellen sources only local flowers for her shop, and she’s leading the way in sustainable floristry. She is a wealth of knowledge on design, floral mechanics, and flowers themselves. We’re truly so lucky to have her in our local community!
Ellen writes a fantastic weekly newsletter, always filled with interesting floral facts and tips, as well as news about her newest project, FlowerMore, an online community for flower nerds. Visit this link to sign up— you won’t be disappointed!
Without further ado, I present Ellen’s reflections on Flower Camp.
Popsicles! Sprinklers! Floral-inspired snow cones! SO MANY FLOWERS! This July, two farmers in my region, Maya from Hillen Homestead and Elisa from Two Boots Farm hosted the first ever Maryland Flower Camp for farmers and florists. Designed as a day flower pros could come together and "play" with flowers. I was excited when they asked me to be part of the planning process.
“Every July our farm struggles with having too many flowers and not enough sales outlets. Additionally, as my business has become more successful, I feel like I have more capacity to do things for joy rather than just hustling nonstop to make enough money. The camp idea came from a conversation I had years ago with Holley Simmons from She Loves Me in DC. I was really wanting to build more time for play in my life.”
We planned the event for July 9th because this is typically a very slow time for farmers and florists in our region. And even though it’s slow, farmers often have a ton of beautiful product available. The schedule for the day was full of activities including a farm tour at Two Boots, a Top Chef style flower guessing game, stations for new products and the main event, a creative team challenge to design a floral installation on the farm.
“Elisa proposed this idea to me during our annual winter planning meeting, and although it was definitely her brain child I jumped fully on board and we ran with it. We were so lucky to have some florists like Ellen Frost and Kate Campbell help us out with the planning and execution.”
Most professional flower designers get into the industry because they love designing flowers. The reality is that we spend much of our time on tasks that have little to do with hands-on flower arranging. When we do design, it's almost always for customers who have their own aesthetic and goals for the designs. From the outside, it may look like floristry is a job where we "play with flowers," but creating for ourselves, just for fun, with no plan or goal is rare. Flower farmers love flowers too, but rarely make time to design just for themselves. The daily tasks on the farm take priority over “playing” with flowers.
The concept of play has been proven to fight burnout and boredom in creatives. In Ali Abdaal's book Feel Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You, he touts the power of play. He suggests embracing curiosity and then making time to pursue that curiosity, with no expectation of a practical result. That’s the hard part right? We always want to do something to move the needle, whatever that needle is, forward.
Making time for play in the flower world is hard. Flower farmers and florists hustle during the busy seasons. We don't prioritize creative play time. That's why Flower Camp was such a hit. The highlight of the day was breaking into mixed teams of farmers and florists to create installations around the farm. Found items and farm structures were incorporated. One team decorated the porta potty!
I couldn’t have imagined when I started Local Color Flowers 17 years ago that an event like this would ever be possible. 30 farmers and 30 florists spending the day together, just for fun. When I started Local Color Flowers in 2008, there were only five farmers locally who sold to me. I didn’t personally know a single florist that was doing what I was doing. It was a little lonely in the beginning and I wasn’t really sure that the business that I was creating would work. Everything is different now. The local flower industry is growing and thriving today. The ASCFG has close to 3,000 members now. The Maryland Cut Flower Growers Association is approaching 300 farmers. Slow Flowers has over 800 members. My community is full of florists and farmers that have local flowers at the heart of their business. It’s truly amazing!
The event was made even more special by all of the organizations and businesses that participated. All of the flowers were donated by participating local farms. The attendees got to use dahlias, zinnias, celosia, lisianthus and more. There were flowers as far as the eye could see. The abundance was so beautiful. All of the flower mechanics were donated too. Harmony Harvest came and they brought their Floral Genius frogs for all of the participants to try out in their designs for the day. Stephanie and Jessica are full of energy and excitement over sustainable mechanics. Their participation was a ton of fun. Farmers and florists also got to experiment with Agra-Wool, OshunPouch, and a new compostable water tube from New Age Floral. There were also great door prizes donated by the ASCFG. The Maryland Department of Agriculture, Farm Credit and Local Color Flowers sponsored the event to keep the costs down for participants (it only cost $20 for florists and was free for farmers who donated flowers).
“ Hosting Flower Camp has already grown my florist customer base and increased sales during the summer months when sales are usually lagging. There has been a buzz about it all summer. Maybe next year we will take this camp theme even further and have an overnight camp out! I wonder who would actually do it with me!”
We learned a lot from this first event and will take it all in to make improvements for next year! Here are our takeaways if you’d like to think about planning an event like this in your community.
We didn’t do an open call for participants or a social media blast - instead we targeted florists we knew were buying some local products and farmers we knew were actively selling to florists. You could cast a much wider net to try to reach florists who aren’t familiar with local flowers or who you would like to build relationships with, but we took a more targeted approach for this first event.
We recruited a local photographer who agreed to capture the day in exchange for flower credit from Two Boots Farm and Hillen Homestead - so grateful to have all these amazing images, and we definitely recommend having a photographer on hand
We were way too ambitious with how many activities we planned. Everything took longer than we planned. Transitions with large groups take awhile, and many of the participants were craving down time to chat and get to know each other. Luckily we pivoted mid-event to make the agenda much more reasonable.
Everyone liked the farm tour at the beginning of the day before it got scorching hot (it was 100 degrees that day!) The only issue was that it was a very large group and it was a little hard to hear in the back. We’re considering breaking up the group into two tours next time.
The potluck lunch was a hit. This was the time that everyone was able to catch up, talk with old and new friends and just relax. We joked that this could have been the whole day because people were just so excited to be together. In terms of the potluck lunch, there were a lot of leftovers. Considerations for next year include people bringing their owned bagged lunches or participants signing up to bring specific dishes.
The installation activity was the most fun part of the day! Everyone loved getting to “play” with flowers. We’d do a better job of assigning teams next year so that is an even number of farmers and florists per team.
“Getting to see the bounty and variety of local stems in peak-season was energizing during the July slump, and getting to meet some florists and farmers in person who I only interact with online was also such a treat. I’d definitely recommend trying a similar event in your area!”
The attendees embraced a day away from their flower jobs to "play with flowers." Even though it was blazing hot, everyone left feeling inspired and refreshed to try new things on their farms and in their shops.
We’re at the Baltimore Farmers Market this Sunday, August 22nd from 7:00- 12:00.
We’re planning to bring bouquets,hydrangeas, celosia, dahlias, eucalyptus, snapdragons, tweedia, rudbeckia triloba, salvia, and Two Boots merch.
And, of course, the Build Your Own Bouquet bar is back!
Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you at the market!
Amelia, Ellen, & The Two Boots crew
Late summer floral bounty