Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Podcast Index | RSS | More

It’s great to be back with you today — and to share another inspiring and uplifting conversation about the healing power of plants and the ability of flowers to nurture us, body and soul.

My guest today is botanist-turned-farmer-florist Kate Watters of Arizona’s Wild Heart Farm. I first met Kate several years ago through the community of florists and flower farmers in Arizona, where I often visited my parents who were living outside of Phoenix.

Kate and I connected through her frequent collaborator, Terri Schuett, owner of Happy Vine Flowers, a Prescott Valley area florist who is also part of the Slow Flowers Movement. The women produced a beautiful styled shoot that we published in Florists Review in December 2019, and I’ve secretly always wanted them to team up for a desert-inspired botanical couture piece for American Flowers Week!

READ: The Desert as Floral Canvas

READ: Flower Power: A farmer-florist reflects on the time she sold Valentine’s Day roses on a Las Vegas corner

Kate has an extensive background in botany, ecological restoration and agriculture, coming to floristry while establishing flower and herb gardens at Orchard Canyon on Oak Creek, a 10-acre destination resort in Sedona.

She transitioned to flower farming full time when she and her partner Mike Knapp found a unique property in Rimrock. They knew it could become the heart and home for both of their personal and professional endeavors. As Kate says, after 20 years in the field and wilds of botany and conservation, she wanted nothing more than to grow fields of flowers.

Now, at Wild Heart Farm, Kate calls her approach to plant-based products and programs ‘Flower Healing.’ “Plants have so many qualities that bolster emotional and mental wellness,” she explains. I invited Kate to share more in today’s conversation. The second part of this episode features a 12-minute video tour of Wild Heart Farm, which Kate filmed to give us a closer look at this special destination in the high desert.

Learn more about BLOOMING FROM THE ASHES: FOREST FIRE AND COMMUNITY RESILIENCE, Wild Heart Farm at ArtX on May 26th, 2023

Follow Wild Heart Farm on Facebook and Instagram

---

This week’s News

And a reminder that tomorrow is our free webinar for Southern States flower growers. You’re invited to Join Slow Flowers +Johnny’s Selected Seeds at attend, tomorrow, April 27th (2 pm Pacific/5 pm Eastern). I’ll be co-hosting the session with Johnny’s Seeds’ Flower Product Manager Hillary Alger for a discussion on what it means to grow flowers in the challenging climatic conditions of the southern United States.

Our  guest panel of experienced Slow Flowers members are cut-flower growers from Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. We’ll hear their farming stories firsthand and discuss regional growing challenges, lessons learned, and their favorite varieties. You’ll meet and learn from them:

Rita Anders, Cuts of Color, Weimar, Texas

Eileen Tongson, FarmGal Flowers, Orlando, Florida

Taij & Victoria Cotten, Cotten Picked, Pittsboro, North Carolina

Julia Keel, Full Keel Farm, Fort White, Florida

The webinar is free and you can find the sign up link below. I hope to see you there!

---

Thank you to our Sponsors

This show is brought to you by Slowflowers.com, the free, online directory to more than 850 florists, shops, and studios who design with local, seasonal and sustainable flowers and to the farms that grow those blooms. It’s the conscious choice for buying and sending flowers.

Thank you to our lead sponsor, Farmgirl Flowers. Farmgirl Flowers delivers iconic burlap-wrapped bouquets and lush, abundant arrangements to customers across the U.S., supporting U.S. flower farms by purchasing more than $10 million dollars of U.S.-grown fresh and seasonal flowers and foliage annually. Discover more at farmgirlflowers.com.

Thank you to sponsor CalFlowers, the leading floral trade association in California, providing valuable transportation and other benefits to flower growers and the entire floral supply chain in California and 48 other states. The Association is a leader in bringing fresh cut flowers to the U.S. market and in promoting the benefits of flowers to new generations of American consumers. Learn more at cafgs.org.

Thank you to Store It Cold, creators of the revolutionary CoolBot, a popular solution for flower farmers, studio florists and farmer-florists. If you watch the video tour that Kate filmed for us, you’ll see a good example of her CoolBot. Save $1000s when you build your own walk-in cooler with the CoolBot and an air conditioner.  Don’t have time to build your own?  They also have turnkey units available. Learn more at storeitcold.com.

Thank you to Red Twig Farms. Based in Johnstown, Ohio, Red Twig Farms is a family-owned farm specializing in peonies, daffodils, tulips and branches, a popular peony-bouquet-by-mail program and their Spread the Hope Campaign where customers purchase 10 tulip stems for essential workers and others in their community. Learn more at redtwigfarms.com.

---

Thanks so much for joining me today! The Slow Flowers Podcast is a member-supported endeavor, downloaded more than one million times by listeners like you. Thank you for listening, commenting and sharing – it means so much. As our movement gains more supporters and more passionate participants who believe in the importance of our domestic cut flower industry, the momentum is contagious. I know you feel it, too. If you’re new to our weekly Show and our long-running Podcast, check out all of our resources at SlowFlowersSociety.com

---

I’m Debra Prinzing, host and producer of the Slow Flowers Show & Podcast. The Slow Flowers Podcast is engineered and edited by Andrew Brenlan. The content and opinions expressed here are either mine alone or those of my guests alone, independent of any podcast sponsor or other person, company or organization.  Next week, you’re invited to join me in putting more Slow Flowers on the table, one stem, one vase at a time. Thanks so much for joining us today and I’ll see you next week!

---

Music credits:

Drone Pine; Falaal; Turning on the Lights; Gaena
by Blue Dot Sessions
http://www.sessions.blue

Lovely
by Tryad 
http://tryad.bandcamp.com/album/instrumentals
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

In The Field
audionautix.com

Here’s a story that ran in the Los Angeles Times last month. It’s about a few of Stephanie Bartron’s projects to remake her clients’ ugly concrete patios into more attractive – and sustainable – backyard features. The best part of the story is learning how easy it is to turn this technique into a DIY project of your own. The LA Times also features an awesome in this photo gallery. Read on . . .

If landscape designer Stephanie Bartron has her way, California’s sea of patio concrete is going to start shrinking.

When the Los Angeles landscape designer eyed her clients’ slab behind a 1940s Atwater Village bungalow, she knew the concrete had to go. New hardscape and plants would have done the trick, sure, but digging out all that paving was costly and, the the waste would just end up in the landfill.

So, Bartron took a different approach. She hired a professional industrial saw operator to slice up the 20-by-20 foot patio into a grid of 18-inch squares.

The result is a new focal point for the garden, resembling evenly-spaced pavers divided by 4-inch bands of grass. When it rains, the storm water percolates into the ground rather than streaming down the driveway and into the street. Little material was thrown away. But the biggest effect was aesthetic. The repurposed patio no longer resembles a basketball court, nor does it dominate the tiny lot.

“By cutting it up, I changed the scale of the concrete from a big slab into an attractive backyard feature,” the designer says.

While his two children play nearby, owner Caleb Dewart, a television producer, likes to lounge beneath the mature orange tree that Bartron saved.

“We’re really happy we didn’t have to tear this up and start over,” he says of the patio. “And we like using what we have rather than being wasteful.”

Bartron’s approach solves myriad design challenges, and the designer has artfully sliced up several ugly patios and driveways for clients. Environmentally conscious homeowners like reducing the waste associated with redesigning a landscape. Budget-conscious clients like getting a lot of bang for their buck.

According to Kenny Grimm, sales manager for Oxnard-based Independent Concrete Cutting Inc., this kind of project requires an experienced operator to cut concrete with a diamond blade, 37-horsepower saw. Cost: $140 per hour, plus travel charges.

“We’re seeing more people re-use their existing material because recycling your paving is an affordable alternative to hauling it away,” he says. “You can get a lot of cutting done for around $1,000.”

For yoga instructor Lucy Bivins and cinematographer Eric Schmidt, Bartron recycled front-yard concrete into useful elements, including garden benches and a prominent water feature.

The couple inherited a gray slab when they purchased a Mt. Washington house designed by architect Barbara Bestor. The concrete had been installed by a previous owner as part of a carport, Bivins says. “It was very bleak and unattractive,” she says. “A real eyesore.”

At Bestor’s suggestion, she and Schmidt contacted Bartron for design help.

“We asked for shade trees, an outdoor gas fireplace and some type of fountain,” Schmidt says. “Stephanie turned the unused space into our outdoor living room, which in just a few years has been filled by a canopy of shade trees. It’s a favorite place to sit with our newborn son, Hugo, listen to the fountain and watch the trees move in the wind. It calms him down every night before bedtime.”

Used to working with old, cracked paving, Bartron was fascinated with the newer concrete. Four-inches thick and embedded with rebar, it covered 400 square feet between the street and her clients’ front door.

Coming up with a savvy design that created little waste was “like solving a big jigsaw puzzle,” the designer says. “This material was in great shape, but we wanted to turn one giant slab into many smaller elements for a bold and inviting garden space.”

Bartron chose a rectilinear motif to echo the architecture’s lines, slicing the patio into 1-1/2-by-4-foot sections. She layered the cut-out concrete in the form of an L-shaped seating area, the bench backed by a new, horizontal-plank fence. Narrower slices of concrete stacked four levels high form the edges of a contemporary fountain and koi pond. Cross sections reveal aggregate-like detailing when sanded smooth.

Bartron left some of the concrete in place but carved away planting strips to accommodate low-growing, drought-tolerant dymondia, a silver groundcover. She also removed enough patio to create two large beds for Eastern redbud trees (Cercis canadensis), carex and fescue grasses, and New Zealand flax. Evenly-spaced concrete bands serve as a walkway from the front door and adjacent bubbling fountain to the L-shaped seating, which has a gas-piped steel fire bowl designed by New York artist Elena Colombo .

“It’s a very sexy entertaining space,” Bivins says. “Whenever we have people over, we end up around the fire bowl. There can be 10 of us here and it still feels intimate.”

She praises Bartron for coming up with a money-saving design that also enhances the architecture.

“It was very crafty of her,” she says. “She took our lemon and made lemonade.”

Cutting up the patio

Want to slice up your patio? Landscape designer Stephanie Bartron says it’s not for the faint of heart. It’s possible to make small cuts using a power hand saw with a diamond blade, but you should take safety precautions such as wearing safety goggles and heavy gloves. Large-scale projects, such as the ones shown here, are best left to professional contractors.

Draw a map of your patio and think about where you want to place furniture. Table and chair legs need to be placed on an even surface, not in the spaces between concrete.

Dig along your patio to determine the concrete’s depth and the edge type (uniform or jagged). Newer concrete may be even, but old patios tend to be rough-edged. The type of edge may determine if or how the cut pieces may be repurposed.

While marking your pattern with chalk, note of any cracks, chips or score lines. If possible, tweak your design to eliminate these blemishes.

If the concrete is prone to cracking, Bartron suggests cutting it so the remaining pads are standard paver sizes (18- or 20-inch squares). “That way you can pull out a cracked section and install a replacement paver,” she says.

Garden Design magazine asked me to profile one of its “Green Awards” winners for the September-October issue, which is out on newsstands this week.

The story is about a lovely, sustainable landscape designed to complement the cutting-edge, eco-architecture of Margarido House in Oakland.

Margarido House is the creation of builder-owner Mike McDonald of McDonald Construction & Development, and his architect-brother Tim McDonald of Philadelphia-based Plumbob.  The brothers and their multiple collaborators have created a stunning residence that earned the highest (Platinum) rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. It is the first home in Northern California to obtain the LEED-H Platinum Award (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).

What makes this garden and its home sustainable?

1. It’s Permeable : The patio, roof and driveway surfaces are designed to capture all of the property’s storm water runoff. The driveway’s decorative design uses recycled and perforated Pavestone concrete tiles. Water percolates into a 4,000-gallon cistern hidden under the driveway and, when needed, circulates through the property for irrigation and flowing through the Zen garden’s piped fountain. “We’ve created a self-contained water loop,” Mike points out.

 2. It’s Durable: Garden designer Lauren Schneider of  Wonderland Garden and Landscape in Oakland, chose a diverse, drought-tolerant plant palette. She worked closely with local growers to specify California native varieties, as well as plants from many Mediterranean regions, including South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, South America and Mexico. She closely observed the garden during its first year to evaluate whether each plant was durable enough to survive Oakland’s dry summer conditions with infrequent water.

 3. It’s Reusable: Recycled concrete is the basis for Margarido House’s über-modern S-curve chaises, tabletops and sleek urns, which contain succulents, bamboo, and New Zealand flax. Created by Bay Area Concreteworks Studio, which also fabricated interior concrete counters, the products satisfy LEED’s “local” and “reusable” criteria. Other outdoor furniture also has recycled content, including Room & Board’s  “Emmet” Adirondack-inspired chairs, by Loll Designs, made with 100 percent recycled high density polyethylene (plastic).

One of the key scoring factors in earning this ranking is Lauren’s sustainable landscape design.

Dreamy and naturalistic, the garden is an organic counterpoint to the geometric architecture.

Lauren actually created three distinct gardens – one on the ground; one in the air; and one that climbs an incredible vertical retaining wall and has multiple sections for planting (not to mention a melodic water feature to attract birds).

Photographs of the Margarido’s rooftop garden weren’t included in the Garden Design layout, due to space constraints. I wanted to make sure and show some here. The rooftop is pretty stunning, and not just because it has killer views of San Francisco Bay. It is installed on top of a capillary mat and layer of geo-textile material; over this base are “three inches of horticultural pumice as a drainage medium and five inches of lightweight planting mix,” Lauren explains.

The dramatic design includes sedums and sempervivums, golden barrel cactus, lewisia, Cleveland sage, lavender, deer grass, and Libertia peregrinans, a New Zealand iris relative valued for its bronzy-orange blades.

This garden provides top-down insular qualities that cool or warm the home, depending on the season. Flowers and stems of Cleveland sage, silhouetted against the sky, can even be seen through the skylight that illuminates the master bath. The roof garden invites its viewers to look close and study the interplay of plant colors and forms. In an abstract way, they echo the distant scenery where treetops and buildings form an irregular city skyline.

You can read the full story here. And enjoy this gallery of photos that I shot when visiting this past May. You’ll see details that caught my eye and get a fuller sense of this amazing landscape and home.

Flowers lovers understand me when I talk about the disconnect that’s going on between the demand for organically-grown food and the miniscule desire for organically-grown flowers. I guess the argument goes: As long as I’m not EATING those flowers, why should I be bothered that a few chemicals were used on them in the field or after they were harvested?

Gardeners and flower fanatics alike have Amy Stewart and Flower Confidential to thank for heightening our awareness of this contradiction. The idea that we can enjoy the beauty of a bouquet’s stems and blooms while knowing that the growing process may have harmed the earth and those who grew the flowers is crazy! How can we honestly enjoy flowers in our homes or as symbols of our most sentimental occasions when they were drenched in chemicals or shipped thousands of miles on a jet flying across the ocean?

Thankfully, there is a burgeoning “slow flower” movement afoot, and I urge you to join me as we use our pocketbooks and consumer influence to encourage reversal of flower-growing practices that use herbicides, pesticides and non-organic fertilizers. I hope the momentum continues and becomes an ever-present conversation between flower purveyors and flower consumers. I can’t tell you how many times I witness friends ask a waiter if the fish on the menu was “wild catch” or “farm raised.” Similarly, when I buy flowers, I want to know: Were they were grown organically?

”]In addition to the essays in Flower Confidential, I have Erin Benzakein to thank for my education about seasonal, sustainable and local flower-growing. Erin owns floret flowers, a Mount Vernon, Wash.-based micro-farm where she uses organic practices to raise beautiful, unusual blooms for bouquets, floral designers and wedding clients. Erin is featured in a recent issue of Sunset magazine, along with my short Q-and-A and a gorgeous photograph by David Perry.

For David and me, the desire to meet, interview, photograph and document organic flower growers has been under our skin for a few years now. Other creative projects, family demands, and sheer marketplace apathy have slowed us slightly. But we both keep returning to the subject of organic flowers. I can’t let go of the notion that this is an important topic – one that needs to be shared in order to educate, inform, inspire and – change – the relationship people have with the flowers.

While in the Northwest two weeks ago, I had a wonderful chance to visit yet another organic flower farm: Jello Mold Farm. The project of Diane Szukovathy and Dennis Westphall  is an example of priorities put into practice for a commercial venture. As they write on their beautiful web site (you’ll see many of David’s photographs there), “Our flowers are safe to sniff.”

My cohort, David, an amazing photographer with whom I’ve been on this occasional journey, drove me north to Skagit Valley. We had a few stops along the way, including a sandwich at a cool roadside deli and a quick visit to Christianson’s Nursery to feast our eyes upon the cottage borders (Christianson’s is one of my favorite charming places – where plants happily coexist with weathered farm buildings).

We arrived at Diane and Dennis’s place as they came home from a day of making deliveries to customers in the Seattle area. They deliver a heady array of fresh, field-cut flowers every Monday and Thursday to Seattle area designers, event planners and retail florists.

Time to sit down for a cold one and a good gab around the kitchen table, as we all got to know one another and talk about the flower biz.

Here are some snippets from our four-way conversation. It will give you a flavor for the longer feature story we want to publish about them:

+First things first. The name Jello Mold Farm is a curious one that always invokes a question. It is an offshoot of Diane and Dennis’s gardening business, Jello Mold Landscape, which got its name from a crazy building in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood that Diane once covered with 400 copper-hued jello molds of all shapes and patterns. Read that history here.

+Diane and Dennis have converted an 8-acre farm and its former horse pastures into a bountiful flower farm. They grow 150 varieties of blooms . . . with many, many more on the way.

+After years of estate gardening, Diane yearned to put her energy into a venture that combined her obsession for plants and her values. “I needed to do something else with my energy for my living. (Estate gardening) doesn’t fully feed my soul.”

+They started selling flowers last year and 2009 is their first season to have scheduled deliveries to wholesale customers. Diane emails an “availability list” to a growing group of flower buyers twice a week.

+In Seattle, you can find their flowers at Best Buds (Madison Park), Ballard Market, and several floral studios, including Terra Bella, an organic florist in the Greenwood District.

+They like to use the term “sustainably grown,” rather than organic. “Quality is our best calling card,” Diane says. “Fresh and local sells.”

+This is hard work, requiring 14 to 16 hour days. “There’s a whole romantic idea that we are so lucky to work on a flower farm,” Dennis admits. “People have no idea how hard we work.” Yet the couple believes they can make a decent living growing flowers rather than food, a lesson they learned after volunteering with a local CSA farmer. “There’s no way we could make a mortgage growing food,” Dennis points out.

+Making bouquets is extremely time-consuming, so Jello Mold often sells straight bunches of a single type of flower, such as dahlias. But when they do make bouquets, “I always try and put in something unique, to create a following,” Diane says. As an example, she showed me a simple bouquet with five dark pink peonies gathered within a pillow of lime-colored Alchemilla mollis (Lady’s-Mantle). They also use a lot of food in their bouquets, like berries, vines and fruiting branches.

+Organic growers are not able to command a higher price for their cut flowers. They have to meet the same market prices charged by growers using standard, non-sustainable practices.

+Slowly, over time, this may change. But only when consumers value the health benefits (to themselves and to the planet) of bringing home an organic, sustainably-grown bouquet. “It’s in the food movement already,” Diane says. It’s only a matter of time for the floral trade (and their customers) to catch up.

+This is an emotion-based business. One of passion and conviction. Diane and Dennis take delight in seeing people make an emotional connection to their flowers. They want to take care to grow sustainably in a world where such practices don’t make financial sense to larger growers.  “Ours is a better way to grow a business,” Diane says.

It was so hard to leave with our conversation just getting started. But I’m inspired and encouraged to know these new friends. And to know they are living their passion and convictions every day.

If you’re seeking creative inspiration, or need a gift idea for that crafty person in your life, look no further than Salvage Studio of Seattle.

My pals Beth Evans-Ramos, Lisa Hilderbrand and Amy Duncan share a “lust for rust” in their pursuit of sustainable design (to them, this means “reduce, reuse and recycle”) for the home, garden, and more. They teach classes at their studio in Edmonds, Washington, and frequently publish an idea-filled blog, also called Salvage Studio.

Just out, their new book, “The Salvage Studio: Sustainable Home Comforts to Organize, Entertain and Inspire” (Skipstone Books/Mountaineers, $21.95), is a compendium of the best salvage projects created and collected by these three gals over the past few years.

Imagine my delight when my review copy of The Salvage Studio arrived a few weeks ago. The attractive 8-1/4-inch x 9-1/4-inch book contains 200 gorgeous pages of great design ideas, tips for turning discarded items into decorative accents, step-by-step projects and more. I turned to the Acknowledgements page to find a thoroughly unexpected gift from the authors:

READ MORE…

 I’m standing with Richard Turner, editor-in-chief of Pacific Horticulture magazine. We’re volunteering at the 2008 NWFGS in Seattle, visiting with Dawn Chaplin, formerly a fellow board member of Northwest Horticultural Society and a great garden-touring pal (she’s now a Whatcom Co. Hort. Society board member).

The press release just arrived in my in-box, and it announced the 2009 Northwest Flower & Garden Show’s theme. It’s only six months away – and I’m already excited! The theme: SUSTAINABLE SPACES. BEAUTIFUL PLACES. I like it! A lot!

The Northwest Flower & Garden Show, created by my pal, the talented and visionary Duane Kelly, today announced its 2009 theme:

“. . . (the) show will place a major focus on gardening materials and techniques that are good for the environment,” said Duane Kelly, chairman and founder of the annual event, now in its twenty-first year. “Show goers can expect to come away with a number of great ideas that conserve resources such as water and soil while, at the same time, making their gardens more self-sustaining and easier to care for.

“During the past year, organic gardening and vegetable gardening have grown in popularity thanks to the public’s keen interest in doing what’s best for the environment.  The movement has also gained traction with consumers seeking homegrown fruits and vegetables that not only taste better but reduce ever increasing grocery bills.”

READ MORE…