I love the beauty that flowers bring from the outside of my home to the inside. I’m obsessed. As my brothers were planting hay fields, I wanted to plant flowers in the fields, a flower garden, flowers everywhere around the house, and bring the flowers indoors.

I was raised as a Bloom surrounded by blooms. My grandmother would plant flowers all around her house. The one year she planted a flower bed in her front yard with huge impatiens. Huge impatiens! It was absolutely beautiful. She passed this love of flowers to my mom. My mom always had beautiful daffodils, forsythia bushes, rhododendrons, peonies, and annual summer flowers. Both passed their love of flowers to me.

With my own property, I have cut flower gardens, flower beds, flower arrangements in containers, and flowers with my vegetables. I love starting my own seeds, trying new varieties, creating beautiful arrangements, saving seeds for a future abundance of blooms, and observing God’s beautiful blooms that he blesses me with.

Cut Flowers

I haven’t always cut flowers, or even respected cutting flowers for arrangements. When I first met my husband, I shared that if he was going to buy me any flowers, they needed to be in dirt. And he did. But then breaking my standards, he brought me flowers that he picked. Brown-eyed Susan’s, orange tiger lilies, and some butterfly weeds. I then cut white hydrangea from my mom’s farm to add to the bouquet. I fell in love with cutting and arranging farm grown flowers.

When my husband and I bought our own property, my first focus was planting a garden with cut flowers. Not just in rows like all the years before, but using techniques from Floret’s Flowers. I planted flower beds in my cut flower garden 3’ x 10’ of zinnias, marigolds, poppies, and phlox. I made bouquets every now and then, even creating bouquets for our family pictures that fall.

The following year, I planted a lot of flowers in landscape fabric and sold bouquets at the local farmer’s market. Being in the garden late in the evening was my favorite hours during this season. My mind came to a rest. My energy levels soared from being in a quiet environment. And sometimes just laying down in the walkways to be present with the blooms brought me the greatest happiness. Serving God’s beautiful Earth growing and harvesting flowers is the best part of managing a small scale cut flower farm.

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Bedding Flowers

If there was a gene for loving flowers, I have it! I believe, though, spending my childhood years in an environment surrounded by planting flower beds has fostered my love of flowers. I love being around them. And the flowers that are blessed to live their life outside in the ground have a special place in my heart. It is the start of a lifelong love between a Bloom and her blooms.

I grew up helping my mom and grandmother with their flower beds and my pap’s gravesite. As soon as I could drive, I was out shopping deals and clearances for flowers to plant here and there, and welp, exactly everywhere.

The shopping and the planting weren’t even the most exciting parts of the flowering adventure. It was the blooms. It was seeing the marigolds start off as smaller plants to bloom into a massive plant with hundreds of blooms in the early fall season, and being heartbroken when the rain would damage the petunia blooms, only for the petunias to perk up with their blossoms on the next sunny days. As the season stretched on, the flowers became more beautiful and vigorous until the fall frost came to put the blooms to rest.

Planting flower beds now at my own property is to bring beauty to the Earth and my home, from hanging baskets and my front flower beds to large container arrangements. On visits, my mom and I to obsess over on visits. It connects me to my grandmother and her love of flowers. It connects me to my godly purpose in life in being a steward of God’s Earth and the beauty that it brings to us.

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Floral Bouquets

Creating bouquets takes growing cut flowers to the crafty side. I love my blooms. Sometimes it is tempting to leave the flowers all in the garden. Yet, I swoon over bouquets I make for my own home in my dining room and small ones for the bathroom sinks. I enjoy giving bouquets away to family and friends, as well as providing bouquets to customers to keep for their homes or to give to friends.

Mixed bouquets are so fun to create with all the different shapes, textures, and colors. Honestly, I find en masse bouquets to be my favorites. Handfuls of sunflowers transferred to a vase. Lisianthus. Gladiolus. Dahlias. Zinnias. You name it. I’ve bunched them together and fell in love with the simplicity of its beauty.

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