Our Year in Flowers: A Monthly Look at Flourish Flower Farm

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There is a rhythm to life on a flower farm. It’s a beautiful, sometimes-demanding cycle that runs from the deep quiet of winter planning to the explosive color of summer fields in bloom. As the year draws to a close, we’re pausing to take a look back at what we cultivated, what we learned, and the incredible beauty we had the privilege of sharing.

Here in Asheville, every month brought a new focus: whether it was starting thousands of seeds in our new greenhouse, the joyful chaos of a wedding installation, or sharing our knowledge in our signature floral workshops. This photo journal takes you behind the blooms, from the first tender spring bulbs to the final frost on the dahlias, illustrating the dedicated work of flower farming in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

We’re so grateful to our community for supporting our dream and choosing local flowers. Grab a warm drink and join us as we reflect on a beautiful year, month by month!

January

Highlights from January

  • I loved designing the flowers for my little brother’s wedding in Miami, FL!

  • Working to perfect my sourdough bread recipe on these cold winter days.

  • Cozy winter mornings with Louis and Norman (with Harvey napping nearby).

  • Getting to know the newest addition to the Flourish Flower Farm family, Freyja!

February

Highlights from February

  • Building a new greenhouse so we have more room for seed starting and seedlings!

  • The first butterfly ranunculus sprouts of 2025.

  • I traveled to San Diego for an ASCFG Board Meeting.

  • Building community by gathering with other WNC Flower Farmers for a potluck dinner at Flourish Flower Farm.

March

Highlights from March

  • The crabapple tree is in full bloom. We love seeing spring color return to the Blue Ridge Mountains!

  • Spring bulbs are flourishing! It’s time to start harvesting the first flowers on the farm: daffodils, anemones, snowdrops, and more!

  • Getting ready for the growing season ahead! William on the tractor to prep the annual field for the year’s planting.

  • Peony shoots are just beginning to sprout in the field. Soon, we’ll be harvesting peonies up to 3 times a day!

  • Overwintered snapdragon seedlings are taking off in the high tunnel.

  • Flowering quince blooming on the farm. Flowering branch season is magical!

April

Highlights from April

  • Our Claire de Lune peonies are always the first to bloom at Flourish.

  • Our woody perennials are perfect in spring. We harvest armfuls of snowball hydrangea, lilac, spirea, and more!

  • Ranunculus season is my very favorite. Look at those colors!

  • A handful of flowers harvested from our high tunnel: anemones, foxglove, nigella (or love-in-a-mist), poppies, ranunculus, sweet peas.

  • April is when wedding season starts for Flourish!

    • Our first wedding of 2025 featured this triangle arbor at Honeysuckle Hill, filled with farm-grown peonies, tulips, garden roses, and delphinium. A beautiful wedding full of our favorite spring flowers!

    • Later in April, we had the pleasure of designing a flower-forward white-and-green wedding at the Grove Park Inn. This wedding was originally scheduled for 2024 but was rescheduled due to Hurricane Helene. This was an extra special wedding for us to design.

  • We began offering a signature Horses & Flowers experience at Flourish. I loved getting to bring Freyja to the farm for a test photoshoot, and Freyja loved eating all the Flourish grass!

  • I wish you could smell these lilacs! I love including them in wedding and farmstand designs, but I can’t resist taking a few for myself to make lilac simple syrup.

May

Highlights from May

  • The second edition of my book, Growing Flowers, was released this spring! This updated edition includes more information on topics like succession planting, answers to frequently asked questions, and a bunch of new photos that reflect how much the farm and our flowers have grown since the book was first published in 2021.

  • Mother’s Day was a bloom-filled blur! On top of Mother’s Day orders, we also designed for two weddings that week. Of course, no one worked harder than farm dog Harvey!

  • Welcoming guests to Flourish through our workshops is one of the most rewarding parts of the season. We hosted our two most intensive workshops in May 2025: Flower Farming 101 and Floral Design Essentials.

  • Thanks to our small-but-mighty farm crew holding down the fort, William and I traveled to Iceland for a personal trip. We saw countless waterfalls, fields of flowers (like these lupines), and rode Icelandic ponies on black sand beaches. It was the perfect way to rejuvenate for the rest of the growing season!

  • May wasn’t all sweet peas and waterfalls… We had a bad hailstorm, but thankfully, our plants weren’t too damaged.

  • The spring abundance of blooms continues! Etched salmon peonies, more ranunculus, peachy iris, and the last of our lilac.

June

Highlights from June

  • The growing season is in full swing, and we’re including Flourish flowers in our many elopement bouquets and farmstand bouquets. I love the colors that June brings (and you can spy our first dahlia in a farmstand bouquet!)

  • Astilbe, snapdragons, and delphinium from the shade garden, the annual flower field, and the high tunnel.

  • June is also lavender season at Flourish! We harvest our lavender to dry and also to distill into lavender hydrosol, which we sell in the farmstand and in our online shop. (But you’ll have to wait until next year to try it for yourself – it sells out fast!)

  • Beginning in June, a new client led us to work exclusively with orchids, which was a first for us! Every week during the summer, we designed these all-orchid arrangements for Tiffany & Co’s Bal Harbour pop-up in Asheville to raise funds for Hurricane Helene recovery in Western North Carolina.

  • I also hosted an online design class in June for Flourish community members who aren’t able to travel to the farm for one of our workshops. We had so much fun designing together on Zoom!

July

Highlights from July

  • This July at Flourish was hotter than usual, but still full of beautiful blooms! The fields were bursting this month. We’re extra grateful for our flower cooler in the heat of summer to keep our flowers looking fresh (and for cooling us off during breaks!) Here’s some of what was blooming this July:

    • Peaches N’ Cream dahlias

    • Blue tweedia and a farm friend, the black swallowtail butterfly!

    • Rudbeckia triloba

    • Ballerina zinnias - a new favorite variety by Johnny’s Seeds.

    • Zinderella zinnias with those distinctive pom-pom centers

    • Rubenza cosmos

    • Armfuls of lisianthus

  • We kept the farmstand stocked this month and even held a make-your-own bouquet bar to let our community sample our flowers.

  • The ASCFG hosted a floral design intensive in Asheville at Honeysuckle Hill this month. I was so excited to lead a design class, invite fellow farmers to visit Flourish, and spend time with farm friends like my co-instructor, Anna Stouffer.

August

Highlights from August

  • One of my favorite elopement bouquets using some of the most lovely peaches and cream flowers.

  • August is all about the zinnias and dahlias, but this year brought an unexpected challenger for the “Flower of the Season” title! This verbena simply “flourished” at Flourish and was in constant bloom all season long!

  • The Flourish hydrangeas also started blooming this August. I love tucking these lacy stems into wedding designs and bridal bouquets for a little extra softness.

  • Our On the Flower Farm workshops continued this month with dahlias as the focal flower.

  • August is busy, but Freyja and I still made plenty of time for lots of trail rides at the Biltmore.

September

Highlights from September

  • September was a design-heavy month, and I got things started with a just-for-fun arrangement to spark my creativity.

  • One of my favorite September elopement bouquets featuring peachy dahlias and garden roses, blush zinnias, blue delphinium, and whimsical white cosmos.

  • Designing a bridal bouquet for Garden & Gun Magazine at JuneBug Asheville.

  • Flourish weddings continued with a camp-themed wedding in Black Mountain and a (rainy but beautiful!) wedding at Lonesome Valley in Sapphire, NC.

  • We welcomed guests to Flourish for our Fall Floral Design Essentials class, featuring dahlias. Norman the farm cat even made an appearance!

  • September was full of bright colors in the fields and the farmstand, but these white Japanese anemones brought a lot of whimsy to our fall designs!

  • We couldn’t have made it through this season without our amazing Weeding Wednesday volunteers! We hosted a Volunteer Appreciation lunch at the end of the season as an extra-special thank you to these wonderful ladies!

  • The dog days of summer are almost over!

  • I took a weekend trip to Holt Orchards in Flat Rock for apples, sunflowers, and pumpkins.

October

Highlights from October

  • The growing season is starting to wind down, but not without a few final blooms:

    • The last of our dahlias and foxgloves with a sprig of flowering dill

    • Our first time growing Nerine lilies at Flourish definitely won’t be our last! Aren’t they beautiful?

  • Fall weddings kept us busy! We designed bridal bouquets for 25 elopements in October! Our final wedding of the season featured a range of purple shades for a ceremony at the Biltmore.

  • On the farm, we prepped beds for 2026 and got cold-hardy annuals ready to plant and sell at our fall plant sale.

  • A tree filled with fall pears.

  • As the farm season came to a close, the Flourish team gathered for an end-of-season dinner (the farm gals wearing non-farm clothes!)

  • After a long season, Harvey takes a well-deserved nap.

November

Highlights from November

December

Highlights from December

  • Winter is time for planning for the year ahead, a little bit of hibernating, and decorating for the holidays. Things are looking festive, and I’m excited to see what 2026 brings our way!