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Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Think about seeing a vivid purple-tinged field of lavender. Now imagine yourself walking through it, brushing your fingertips on the scented flowers dancing tall on their wand-like stems. Don’t you wish you could be transported to that place right now?

Fresh cut bunches of lavender from Labyrinth Hill Lavender (photo courtesy Susan Harrington)

There is something so evocative about Lavandula, the plant that is the basis for all of Susan Harrington’s growing, writing and teaching activities. The owner with her husband Jack Harrington of Labyrinth Hill Lavender, Susan is today’s guest on the Slow Flowers Podcast.

Susan connects people with lavender, whether at the farmers’ market, in workshops and through her web-based educational programs.

We met up recently after I attended one of Susan’s inspiring (and intoxicatingly fragrant) workshops at a local garden center. Susan and I discussed her decade-long adventure growing lavender on her “backyard farm” and how that led to a vibrant cottage industry selling fresh-cut lavender and dried lavender buds, first at the farmers’ market and later via mail order. Susan has expanded Labyrinth Hill Lavender into online training for others who want to get into the lavender-growing business and now, a regional conference for lavender farming.

Here is her famous lavender labyrinth, planted with 150 Lavandula x intermedia ‘Fred Boutin’ plants. The labyrinth measures 40-feet in diameter and produces about 700 fresh-cut bundles of lavender per season. 

The lavender labyrinth at peak of season. Photo, courtesy Susan Harrington

Susan mentioned her YouTube video in which she demonstrates her Lavender Bud De-Nuding Process. It’s a little tongue-in-cheek, but clearly a huge success as a method for anyone harvesting lavender buds for aromatherapy or crafting:

More details discussed in our conversation:

Information about Susan’s online lavender growing course, and her FREE mini-course on growing lavender

Information about the October 2014 Northwest Regional Lavender Conference, which Susan and Jack are producing with the Oregon Lavender Association. 

Leaves, Branches, Berries and Blooms

The ideal, low, autumn holiday centerpiece

All the textures and ingredients of the season, with a little polish from the Oregon-grown roses.

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Pilar Zuniga is a Berkeley-based, eco-Green floral designer and outspoken advocate for locally-grown, sustainable flowers and design practices.

Meet Pilar Zuniga, owner of Gorgeous and Green, a Berkeley-based boutique and eco-floral design studio. She’s my guest in this week’s Slow Flowers Podcast with Debra Prinzing.

Pilar started Gorgeous and Green nearly six years ago after she discovered how hard it was to plan her own sustainably-minded wedding. Since then, her venture has expanded from a floral studio designing for weddings and special events to a charming storefront on College Avenue in Berkeley.

One of Gorgeous and Green’s bridal bouquets in a sultry green and dark purple color scheme.

There, you can find a full-service floral and gift shop that carries uncommon goods, curated by Pilar, including vintage jewelry, locally-made goods, recycled-paper stationary,  organic bath and beauty products — and of course, local and sustainably-grown flowers. Gorgeous and Green recently won the Best of Berkeley 2013 award in the florist category.

For anyone interested in learning how a brick-and-mortar retail flower shop can make it in today’s era of mass merchandising and big boxes, you’ll want to join my conversation with Pilar.

She is blazing a new trail and is the TRUE definition of a LOCAL FLORIST….a hometown, Main Street flower shop that goes the full distance to source from local flower farms in her own backyard. 

Succulents grace the wedding table for a Gorgeous and Green client.

Here’s her answer to the “Why Sustainable”? question:

A Native American proverb suggests that all that we do today must be done with the next 7 generations in mind.

The mainstream floral and gift industries have many byproducts like pesticide pollution, dependence on plastics, underpaid labor, hazardous working conditions and excessive CO2 Emissions. Additionally, events are the producers of more waste and CO2 emissions. The average wedding emits 12-14 tons of CO2, more than a person emits in a full year.  

We can minimize these negative effects by amending our practices to become sustainable ones.  For Gorgeous and Green, sustainability means using methods that we can afford to duplicate without negatively affecting the environment and people around us. With a lot of creativity and research, we have been able to develop floral practices and offer gift products that allow us to do just that.

Gorgeous and Green wants to be mindful of not just how we leave our world for the next generation, but how we touch those people and places that were involved in the beauty we created today. 

Take a look at our Services section or visit our On-Line Boutique page to see just what we have come up with so far. We’re always creating new ways to save the earth and stay gorgeous.

Another yummy seasonal floral arrangement, using California-Grown flowers from farmers Pilar knows and supports.

In the second half of our interview, Pilar and I scratched the surface on a MAJOR topic that’s going on right now in the floral world. It regards the concern she and I — and so many others — have about that green florists’ foam, the crumbly, brick-shaped chunk that you often find stuck inside a vase delivered from a floral wire-service. It is a conventional product that has been around since the Postwar 1950s, developed, so it seems, to make arrangements look fuller using fewer stems of flowers and foliage.

The simple economics have (sadly) led many florists down the rabbit hole of same-old, same-old, unimaginative designs based around the foam. I believe it’s a crutch that limits creativity and certainly hurts the people and environment who encounter it. 

Every single week I hear from florists and designers who tell me they are weaning themselves off the product, which is made by a small group of manufacturers in the US and abroad. Those designers are eager to find alternative ways to stabilize stems, such as some that Pilar and I discussed. I will devote a future episode of the Slow Flowers Podcast to more extensive information on this topic. 

The bounty of local farms makes its way into Gorgeous and Green’s designs.

Pilar was one of the first to speak out and warn florists about the risks of using chemically-based foam. As I mentioned in our interview, every time I did a web search about this topic, her blog posts popped up, as early as 2009. Here are some links you’ll want to read: 

(March 4, 2009) Floral Foam: Not so Green 

(September 5, 2009) Biodegradable Floral Foam, Where Are You?

(February 18, 2011) Let’s Change Floral Foam

(August 16, 2011) MSDS Floral Foam

If you’re looking for “green” alternatives to floral foam, check out my blog post about Eco-Friendly Design tips, excerpted from Slow Flowers.

Thank you  for joining me in this episode of the SLOW FLOWERS Podcast with Debra Prinzing. Because of your support as a listener, we’ve had more than 3,000 downloads since July – and I thank you for taking the time to join to my conversations with flower farmers, florists and other notable floral experts.

If you like what you hear, please consider logging onto Itunes and posting a listener review.

Until next week please join me in putting more American grown flowers on the table, one vase at a time. 

The Slow Flowers Podcast is engineered and edited by Hannah Holtgeerts. Learn more about her work at hhcreates.net. 

All photographs courtesy of Gorgeous and Green. Thanks Pilar!

A (LOVING) CUP FULL OF AUTUMN

The last flowers of summer, not to mention those like me who love them, are often reluctant to disappear come fall. That was the case with these beautiful Cafe au Lait dahlias.

Love the detail on this trophy, which my friend Kathryn Renner urged me to acquire.

Ingredients:

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“Enter a rare world of beauty and intricacy,” promises the press release for “Seeing Flowers,”  a remarkable new book featuring the highly detailed, almost transparent flower photographs of Robert Llewellyn. Using a unique photo process that includes stitching together large macro photographs, the visual artist reveals floral details that few of us have ever noticed: The amazing architecture of stamens and pistils; the subtle shadings on a petal; the secret recesses of nectar tubes.

I learned much more about the secret life of flowers in today’s podcast interview with Teri Dunn Chace, the writer with whom Robert Llewellyn collaborated. A longtime horticultural writer and formerly on the staff of Horticulture magazine, Teri blends literary and scientific sources for her essays about 343 popular flowers.

These are blooms beloved by gardeners and floral designers alike and together Robert and Teri portray flowers as you have never before seen them. They gave me a deeper appreciation of how and why flowers have become so embedded in human culture.

In preparing for my podcast interview with Teri, I went back and spent some time with Robert’s earlier book, Seeing Trees, with writer Nancy Ross Hugo. When that book was released in 2011, I was blown away by the detailed process he goes through to capture the essence of leaves, seeds, pods and other tree parts. Each subject is photographed up to 50 times at various distances and the final work is a composite of the sharpest areas of each individual image. The resulting photographs are of stunning hyper-real clarity, as if Robert has found a way to circumvent the limitations of the human eye through his lens. When Seeing Trees was released, publisher Timber Books created a video of the process.

Please enjoy this conversation with author Teri Chace, and add Seeing Flowers to your library reference shelf. Our conversation is a whirlwind tour of flowers, literature and garden writing. You’ll enjoy the ride.

Jaunty blooms of chicory, or Cichorium intybus, open for only a few hours a day. Then the color of the ray flowers rapidly drains away, fading to white. Its dried, ground roots can be used as a coffee substitute. 

During my interview with Teri, we read aloud three literary pieces from Seeing Flowers. Here they are for you to read again, interspersed with a few of Robert’s images:

“The rose is a rose,

And always was a rose.

But now the theory goes

That the apple’s a rose

And the pear is, and so’s

The plum, I suppose.

The dear only knows

What will next prove a rose.

You, of course, are a rose —

But were always a rose.”

Robert Frost, “The Rose Family,” 1928 

The cup in the center of a daffodil is called a corona. Some are short, like a shallow bowl, while others are longer, more like a trumpet. Some have frilly edges, and some are rimmed with a contrasting color.

“Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?

Can one really explain this? No. Just as one can

never learn how to paint.”

Pablo Picasso, Arts de Frances, 1946 

Look past the blue petals of viper’s bugloss, Echium vulgare, and you’ll see that the flowers also feature red stamen filaments and blue pollen. These help them to stand out in form as well as color to pollinators – and to us.

“Ice cream on green cones

white hydrangeas in full bloom

cool the summer day”

Haiku by CDSinex, 2011 

Teri Dunn Chace, author of “Seeing Flowers” 

Robert Llewellyn, photographer of “Seeing Flowers”

ENTER TO WIN: Timber Press is celebrating the publication of Seeing Flowers with an online promotion offering a one-of-a-kind prize. You can enter to win a fine gallery quality print of a photograph from this book. Take a peek at the gorgeous print and the contest details here.  NOTE: the Contest Entry Deadline is this Friday, November 15th.

Thanks for joining me in this episode of the SLOW FLOWERS Podcast with Debra Prinzing. Because of your support as a listener, we’ve had more than 2,650 downloads since July – and I thank you for taking the time to join to my conversations with flower farmers, florists and other notable floral experts.

If you like what you hear, please consider logging onto Itunes and posting a listener review.

Until next week please join me in putting more American grown flowers on the table, one vase at a time. 

The Slow Flowers Podcast is engineered and edited by Hannah Holtgeerts. Learn more about her work at hhcreates.net. 

VINTAGE PATINA

Oh how I love the way hydrangeas respond to cool weather as fall settles in!

Sea Oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) are like little sparklers emerging from the hydrangea mound.

Ingredients:

This was the very first arrangement I designed in early November 2011 when I dreamed up the bouquet-a-week-for-a-year project.

Eco-technique

A BONUS BOUQUET: Using some of the same elements, here’s a bouquet I made this week, November 2013. It employs the same weathered urn, hydrangeas, a lacy form of Dusty Miller, rose hips, feverfew sprays and a few Cafe au Lait dahlias. This is a favorite style to which I continue returning. Love it!

An autumn arrangement glows on a table by my front door.

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Jennie Love and Erin Benzakein are the dynamic east-west floral duo behind The Seasonal Bouquet Project. This lovely poster was hand-illustrated by Shannon Collins 

Courtesy of The Seasonal Bouquet Project, a photo from one of Jennie and Erin’s workshops in October. Erin Benzakein is seen 3rd from left, back row; Jennie Love is seen 6th from left, back row. 

For the past few years, I’ve been interviewing and writing about a category of designer who I dub the “farmer-florist.”

These include a rare group of individuals in the flower world who are equally talented in the science of growing flowers and the art of designing them. 

Jennie Love, farmer-florist, and owner of Love ‘N Fresh Flowers, of Philadelphia

You’ll meet two of those talented people on today’s podcast, Jennie Love of Love ‘N Fresh Flowers in the Philadelphia area and Erin Benzakein of floret flowers in Washington’s Skagit Valley. 

Both Erin and Jennie have been in the business of creating stunning floral art with locally grown materials for several years now. Their west coast/east coast friendship prompted these flower friends to create THE SEASONAL BOUQUET PROJECT in early 2013. Their first post featured yummy, early spring flowers, posted on March 5th.

The Seasonal Bouquet Project emerged from a winter brainstorming session about “how to feed our souls’ fires during the hectic months of the growing season and how to further demonstrate the beauty of locally grown flowers to a wider audience.  And, to be completely candid, it’s a bit of a competitive double dog dare between two people who like to have some fun,” according to their website. 

Erin Benzakein, with her husband Chris and children Elora and Jasper. I took this photo last summer at floret flowers, their farm in Washington’s Skagit Valley.

All the materials used in the bouquets were grown within a 25 mile radius of the respective designer, the vast majority coming straight from their own flower fields.  

As they wrote on their website: “Since  we’re on opposite coasts growing in very different climates, this project is a showcase for what’s available through the seasons across the country.” People all across the country and around the globe, for that matter, followed along on the gorgeous journey. Erin and Jennie also invited readers to post photos of their own bouquets, as long as the ingredients were within that 25-mile radius. 

As you will hear in this interview with Jennie and Erin, which took place on October 25th via Skype, the friends cooked up a 2-day workshop to celebrate the “end” of their season. They planned “The Seasonal Bouquet Project LIVE” and scheduled the event to take place on Jennie’s flower farm in Philadelphia. Listen along to hear what happened next – and gain inspiration and insights into the life of a farmer-florist.

Photos to enjoy from Jennie Love and her farm:

Jennie farms on agricultural land that dates back to William Penn. Photo by Maria Mack Photography ©2012 http://mariamackphotography.com

A beautiful summer bouquet, grown & designed by Jennie Love Maria Mack Photography ©2012 http://mariamackphotography.com

Zinnias in July, designed by Jennie Love.

Photos to enjoy from Erin Benzakein and her farm:

Garden roses at floret flowers, August 2012. I took this shot during our photo shoot for Country Gardens magazine. 

Erin’s bouquet, designed for Country Gardens magazine.

Thanks for joining me in this episode of SLOW FLOWERS. Because of your support as a listener, we’ve had more than 2,200 downloads since July – and I thank you for taking the time to join to my conversations with flower farmers, florists and other notable floral experts.

If you like what you hear, please consider logging onto Itunes and posting a listener review.

Until next week please join me in putting more American grown flowers on the table, one vase at a time. 

The Slow Flowers Podcast is engineered and edited by Hannah Holtgeerts. Learn more about her work at hhcreates.net. 

TARNISHED AND TEXTURED

Super-popular tillandsias, especially this ghostly-white species, makes for an interesting fall centerpiece.

There’s a pleasing asymmetrical balance created by using this tillandsia on the right side of the design, as it echoes the urn’s curved handle on the left.

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Meet Lane DeVries, CEO of The Sun Valley Group, America’s largest cut flower farm, and Chairman of the California Cut Flower Commission.

American Flower Farming Update with Lane DeVries, Chairman of the California Cut Flower Commission (Episode 112)

Today’s interview is with Lane DeVries, a fourth generation flower farmer who grew up in his family’s business in Holland until he came to the US in 1983, at the age of 23.

I’ve gotten to know Lane in the past few years while partnering with him on projects for the California Cut Flower Commission, the advocacy agency that promotes that state’s 225 flower farms. His farm, The Sun Valley Group, based in Arcata and Oxnard, is the state’s largest (in fact, it’s the country’s largest).

Lane and I recently met in Portland, at the Field-to-Vase Dinner, a very special gathering of flower farmers, florists, flower retailers and wholesalers and the media, held on October 8th.

I co-hosted the event with the CCFC and our goal was to convene floral industry leaders to discuss new initiatives in the American Grown Flower Movement.

The underlying message: partnering with your would-be competitors is a good idea when it comes to changing how consumers connect with domestic flowers.

Lane takes time to meet flower consumers as often as possible. He recently made an appearance at New Seasons Market in Portland, Oregon.

My podcast interview with Lane took place via Skype, a few days after that dinner. Please enjoy our conversation and meet a man who lives and breathes cut flowers. I love that Lane, in spite of all of his professional success, continues to eagerly seek out the next new thing. He sees old flowers in a new way and improves on customer favorites with new hybridizing methods.

He is a visionary and I credit Lane with his amazing leadership moving his own flower farming community into an important dialogue about American grown flowers.

The next time you see a blue-and-yellow license plate-style CA-Grown label on a bouquet of flowers at the supermarket, you’ll have people like Lane DeVries to thank.

Highlights of Lane’s long career in the U.S. cut flower industry are chronicled in Amy Stewart’s 2007 book, Flower Confidential: The Good, The Bad, and the Beautiful – and you can read an excerpt of that story here, courtesy of Amy and Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (c) 2007 and 2008. All Rights Reserved. 

(Photos (c) Linda Blue, courtesy of the California Cut Flower Commission)