It's in your gift, it is your power, you can choose

Dear Customer,

This is Common Farm Flowers summer 2024 - note the trees and hedges all of which have been planted since we moved here in 2004.

It is worth pointing out the choices people make when they pick a supplier for their wedding or event. Marketing has long made out that the choices the customer makes are all about what the customer wants, the dream they want to make real, the things they can buy to create that magic moment. And this is all perfectly fine.

But it is also possible for the customer to be reminded of what is in their gift when they make those choices.

When I started growing flowers for sale the issues I had were often pointed out by florists with whom I had hoped to work. In those days I was told again and again, ‘But the brides want X at Y time of year and you don’t grow that. You can’t give the brides what they want all the time so therefore your business is never going to work.’

At first I was intimidated into agreeing with the florists. After all, what did I know? I was just a flower grower, green fingered maybe, but with little experience when it came to what a customer would want. People with many years in the wedding and events business surely knew more than me.

So I just plugged away at a niche I assumed would stay little. I knew that there would be some people who loved the idea of locally grown flowers. And there were enough of them that I slowly built a business around them. And as the business became more established I took time to talk to my customers about what they wanted from me. And again and again and again I was told, ‘We love the idea that the flowers have been grown just down the road from where the wedding will be held.’

‘I can’t promise so many stems of this or that variety,’ I would say, being careful to manage my customers’ expectations.

Invariably the response was that they didn’t mind what varieties I supplied: my customers wanted their wedding or event to be dressed with flowers grown down the lane. They might have a colour scheme, but often not. My customers wanted a mix of flowers that looked as though they’d just been cut from a country garden and I could supply that because they had.

This morning I had a chat with a girl being married this summer. She is not on an especially tight budget, nor are her ideas consciously modest. What she does love though is that after many years of working in this business now I can put into words, marketing speak, if you like, the choice she’s making by ordering flowers from us.

I can explain the difference between a florist who offers a look based on a colour scheme and so many stems of this or that ordered at any time of year for the pleasure of the bride. No matter the distance those flowers have travelled, no matter how long it is since they were cut, no matter the chemical interventions which may have taken place in order for the bride to have the flowers she’s always dreamed of in a particular colour and particular quantity on the day she’s chosen. No matter. And there are many for whom that no matter matters to them.

And to them I say, ‘I am not your florist.’

To the girl who sat with me in my studio today we talked about how good it is for the environment that our flowers come fresh from the field. Some of them will be unusable, I explain, because the bees will have got there first and they’ll be pollinated and going over. I will take care, and spend time, cutting those which will be perfect for her. I’ll grow enough that there’ll be some for the bees and some for the bride. I’ll cut the flowers on the Thursday before the Saturday wedding. They won’t need to have been treated with chemicals to preserve them: they’ll just be fresh.

And yes, they are field grown, and there will be some I can’t use because they are thick with black fly. But I won’t spray the black fly or the green fly or the flea beetle or the caterpillars. I’ll leave those little people because what will the beetles and the small birds and the ants eat without aphid honey dew (this is aphid wee which ants feed their babies with,) and the aphids themselves which make a lovely protein rich food for all kinds of other animals.

It is in the gift, not just of me, the flower farmer, but the bride, too that we have a whole food web flourishing here on our small flower farm in a field between Bruton and Wincanton in sunny Somerset.

Without the bride I have no business. Without the bride there will be fewer flowers grown here. Without the bride I may give up growing flowers for a living and find another way to earn a crust.

And so it is not just in my gift to leave those aphids for the ladybirds to munch, it is in the gift of the bride, my customer. And it’s important that she knows this so that when people say, ‘Oh my goodness the flowers are amazing,’ she can say with pride that she and I are collaborators. Together we are creating an environment so rich in biodiversity that this corner of Somerset is altogether improved by it. It is thanks to her, and to all my other customers, that the dawn chorus here is loud enough to wake me up. She orders flowers from me and there is no packaging, the buckets are returnable, the flowers are offered to her in a bucket of water with no chemicals in it. The flowers don’t need chemical intervention to refresh them after long journeys across the world in cardboard boxes in airplanes.

So this is what the bride chooses when they choose locally grown flowers. They choose to make a gift to the environment. They are choosing that their wedding doesn’t cost the earth. Oh no, their wedding is a gift to the earth offered in exchange for their wonderful, memorable, beautiful day.

Buckets of DIY wedding flowers from Common Farm Flowers - by not guaranteeing so many stems of this or that variety we give our customers a great deal more choice and the very best in the garden on any particular day.