Erin Benzakein of Floret Flower Farm needs little introduction to most garden-minded listeners. She has been so instrumental in cultivating a flower-farming economy in our country.
Her innovative and dedicated seed research and breeding work of the past decade, however, is a whole new lens through which to appreciate her work. As we look toward the Autumnal Equinox later this month, please enjoy this favorite conversation!
Back in 2017, when I first interviewed Erin for the program & for The Earth in Her Hands, she was already a tireless advocate for local flowers and for supporting more flower farmers and local-flower florists in our everyday lives here in the US.
Through her on-farm and subsequently online flower farming Floret Workshops, for more than a decade, she has been renowned for encouraging and training eager new flower-farmer-florists in order to transform the cut flower industry from the multi-billion-dollar, large-corporate-owned international import (with little ecological or economic oversight) behemoth it had become, back into the more lovely and loving, organic, locally-based circular and community-oriented economy she envisioned it could be – and should be.
Floret - once a flower farm and training center – is now more fully (and perhaps even more beautifully) described as “a family-owned flower farm and seed company specializing in breeding new cut flower varieties for gardeners, farmers & designers.”
They add: “ Our thriving research & education farm is dedicated to giving flower lovers the tools & information they need to grow the gardens of their dreams.”
In honor of the Autumnal Equinox, and its seeds of the next season feeling, I am so revisiting Erin on Cultivating Place – just as Floret's newest title, From Bloom to Seed, is now available for preorder!
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We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these.
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