READER'S GARDEN
The child of a gardener and a houseplant lover, I found myself growing as soon as I had the space. I grew in pots in two tenement block front gardens in Glasgow and envied my husband’s allotment. When we moved to Ayrshire ten years ago, it was difficult to believe that I finally had a garden to play in. We built a vegetable bed, put in a greenhouse, and added some chickens to our family. I grew from seed for the first time and fell in love with cosmos and gaura. When I started hearing about people growing their own flowers for cutting, I was irresistibly intrigued.
I cleared a sunny bit at the bottom of the garden and grew some of what I had grown before, plus my first go at sweet peas, Verbena bonariensis and sunflowers. Despite our sandy soil and my inexperience, they (mostly) thrived and I was hooked! Ever the student, I gathered books on growing cut flowers as more of them started to be written and did a course in basic horticulture. Then came lockdown. My day job is in the NHS, but my speciality was one that slowed down considerably in those strange early weeks, and it became pretty clear that home schooling was not going to work out well for us. My mind needed somewhere to go.
So, in the glorious sunny days of 2020, with nowhere else I could be, I attacked the far end of the garden with a vengeance. I dug up three new beds from the lawn and cleared several others. I built frames for sweet peas to climb up and filled the greenhouse with seed trays. The abundance of flowers went on and on. With nothing else to do with them all, I sold a few and Lark Rose, my micro flower farm business, was born.
The next year, I set out to grow with a bit more intent, blissfully unaware of all the things I did not know. For a couple of years I sold a few jam jars and small bunches, severely hampered by my lack of floristry skills, but could not really get going due to fear of not having enough flowers. It became clear, pretty quickly, that doing this properly was going to require a lot more space.
I splashed out on an introductory floristry course and started asking around everyone I knew if there was more land I could rent. At a Jubilee party, a friend mentioned in passing that a mutual friend had a walled garden, I emailed her the next day. She answered a few minutes later, “How strange, I was just about to ask if you were interested”.
The first time I saw the walled garden it was June and the weeds were up around our ears. A market garden between the wars, it was a paddock for horses in the 1960s, but had been neglected since. With their relative who had owned it moving to a nursing home, my new landlords and I took on the considerable task of clearing the land.
The possibility of housing pigs came up early, which I laughed at and dismissed, but my landlady was determined and recruited a friend who happened to be the daughter of a pig farmer to help out. Big Pig and Little Pig (their official names were Napoleon and Wilbur, but their size discrepancy meant the nicknames stuck) arrived in January 2023 and the work they did over the nine months they lived on the plot was amazing. More than just grazers, pigs dig right down to get out roots and turn soil - they were also huge fun to be around and lovely plot companions.
In the first year, I cleared about six 20 metre (66ft) beds, sold wholesale to florists for the first time, grew varieties I had never dared try, made absolutely no money, veered from despair to utter joy, and went up a learning curve so steep it nearly bent back on itself but every time I opened the gate to the garden, my heart lifted no matter what chaos lay beyond it.
I learnt just as much away from the plot too - running a small business is its own learning curve! Selling and marketing do not come easily to me and it is a balance to find out just how far you are willing to get out of your comfort zone. Despite all of this, I grew some really beautiful flowers and rounded off the season with providing DIY wedding flowers for a couple who live almost in view of the plot. That cemented my belief in the importance and possibility of growing local flowers.
Going into my second season in the walled garden, I have clearer ideas of what I want it to be. There will be much more space to grow in, although the whole half-acre plot space is far from cleared. In the longer run, I want to focus on shrubs and climbers that do not need me fussing over them regularly (Ranunculus have already pretty much failed for the year due to my limited bandwidth for pandering to them). I want to strike a balance of things I know how to grow whilst giving myself some interest and challenge.
I know much more about the problems associated with the cut flower market as well and just how important growing British flowers in a sustainable way will be going forward. I cannot wait to share the fun and hard work of the 2024 floral season with all of you.
We love Olivia’s story so much that we’ve asked her to write some more for Scotland Grows magazine, and we look forward to following the journey of her cut flower farm and her tips for us on growing cut flowers!
If you would like to see your garden featured in a future edition of Scotland Grows magazine, please do get in touch to mail@scottishgardeningmagazine.com - we would absolutely love to hear from you!