Marly Surena-Llorens of Fennimore & Rutland in tends dahlias in her Allentown, Pennsylvania garden for a floral CSA program. Photo: Petra Somers/The Flower Farmers
The Flower Farmers: Inspiration and Advice from Expert Growers, by Debra Prinzing and Robin Avni (Abrams, 2025) is filled with stories about the beauty and grit of growing flowers for market, with profiles of 29 farmers from around North America, including specialty cut flower growers, farmer-florists, horticulturists and floral designers.
You might wonder what a book about hardworking flower farmers has to offer home gardeners. Trust me — a great deal, and delightfully so. Prinzing and Avni believe that growing flowers is a universal human act, one that’s accessible and inclusive to all. As the authors state in the book’s introduction: “The dirt welcomes everyone.”
Diane Szukovathy and Dennis Westphall of Jello Mold Farm, located in the Skagit Valley in the Pacific Northwest, with sweet peas. Photo: Mary Grace Long/The Flower Farmers
The dirt welcomes everyone
Farming is far from a one-size-fits-all endeavor. The Flower Farmers features an inspiring selection of people, locations, and approaches. Each flower farmer’s story shares their personal path to flowers and the diversity of farms profiled in the book is as varied as the growers that tend them save for the fact that they all lead with creativity and heart — and labor, lots of labor.
You’ll meet urbanites who have traded city life for country acres, stewards of multigenerational farms and creative entrepreneurs cultivating their crops on leased or borrowed land. There’s even a residential grower whose backyard cutting garden supports a floral CSA and design workshops.
Flower farmer Maria Lourdes Casanares-Still leverages a short growing season in Manitoba with hands-on natural dying workshops using flower petals produced by Masagana Flower Farm. Photo: Jules Regalado/The Flower Farmers
Gorgeous photos of old barns, lush fields filled with flowers and smiling farmers are alluring but make no mistake, growing flowers on a commercial scale is not for the faint of heart. You’ll read how farmers with corporate, technology or hospitality experience leverage slim profit margins with social media-based marketing campaigns or by hosting events like dinner in a flower field or design workshops. Offering year-round eco-tourism courses in crafting with natural plant dyes is how a resourceful flower farmer in Manitoba deals with a short growing season that barely exceeds 100 days.
Alongside their story, each farmer offers a favorite “featured flower,” a deep dive into a unique crop with comprehensive growing, care and harvesting tips, along with their favorite varieties and seed or plant sources for annuals, biennials, bulbs, perennials, and vines. From zinnias, snapdragons and dahlias to peonies, delphinium, chrysanthemum and astilbe, all are presented as cut flower candidates including many that might surprise you. Gorgeous hellebores like the ones pictured on the book’s cover and romantic swags of blooming clematis are familiar to home growers and considered specialty crops for the floral trade. Woody crops include flowering branches, lavender and of course roses.
The Flower Farmers by Debra Prinzing & Robin Avni, Abrams 2025
A garden-gathered arrangement created by Pacific Northwest plantsman Riz Reyes of RHR Horticulture. Photo: Riz Reyes/The Flower Farmers
Prinzing is a Seattle-based writer, speaker and one of the country’s leading advocates for growing and sourcing domestic flowers. She’s also a dear friend that I’ve known since college, only back then we were Lori and Debbie — for those of you doing the math, that’s 45 years. It’s been a joy to watch her grow The Slow Flowers Society, a dynamic hub that encompasses a podcast, a user friendly directory of American and Canadian farms, shops and floral design studios that supply domestic and local flowers, and The Slow Flowers Journal, a quarterly magazine filled with stories about making beauty with flowers.
Avni is a creative director and experienced designer in the media and high-tech industries as well as an advocate for the arts in Washington state. She has produced eighteen floral and lifestyle books, including eight in collaboration with Prinzing, her BLOOM Imprint co-founder and editorial director.
Katie Tolson of Seed-On-Hudson tends crops in a high tunnel on a satellite farm in the Hudson Valley. Photo: Fennel Harper/The Flower Farmers
Katie Tolson’s return to the pottery wheel was motivated by her desire to create vessels to contain the flowers she grows on her Seed-on-Hudson farm. Photo: Fennel Harper/The Flower Farmers
The Flower Farmers invites readers to “garden like a flower farmer” and imagine a flower filled life, even if your “farm” is limited to a backyard plot or a few containers on the patio. You and I may not be up at dawn planting acreage, harvesting stems, or driving miles and miles to sell bouquets at the local farmers’ market (or keep a roadside farm stand stocked), but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from those who do.
From the book’s afterword, Floral Futures, contributed by Becky Feasby of Prairie Girl Flowers, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
The stories and photos contained in these pages provide a beautiful illustration of the importance of seasonality and how flowers farmers across North America are working hard to change our expectations of what is possible with locally grown, seasonal flowers. … As the world grapples with the escalating impacts if global warming, decreased biodiversity, and pollution, it is the growing number of small-scale, local flower farmers who are emerging as a beacon of hope, offering meaningful benefits for both the environment and communities.
Bay Area floral designer Max Gill of Max Gill Designs is known for using graceful clematis vines in his garden-driven floral designs. Photo: Caitlin Atkinson/The Flower Farmers
Does anybody know the name of that delicate bell-shaped clematis in the last photo, raspberry pink with a pale yellow/greenish edge?
*** EDITED TO ADD *** A little research suggests it might be Shizuku.
So cool, right?
Hi Susan,
Thank you so much for your insightful article! Your exploration of how flower farmers approach design, productivity, and beauty in their gardens was both enlightening and inspiring. I particularly appreciated your emphasis on the value of intentional planting and the lessons home gardeners can learn from professional practices to enhance their own spaces.