It is mid- June, and the time of year when, if I choose to, I sow biennial seed to flower the following spring. Every year I order the seed in May, and when it arrives it sits on the side for a few weeks and I look at it from time to time, but don’t touch it. This is the time when I can choose. Will I grow flowers for sale in 2026? If I will then it is the sowing of these seeds sitting on the side in the studio in a little pile which will confirm the process. And for a moment, a week or so, there’s a breath, a hiatus, in which I hold still and allow myself to know that I might not.
Being a small scale flower farmer as I am is a choice. I could chuck it and get a job elsewhere: I could be paid to be a gardener, I could get a job running another business’ social media, I could perhaps teach…. For a few weeks I consider the options. I am not required to continue with my current path - I could take another. Having a choice is liberating. I enjoy that feeling of freedom. But then the day comes, and it feels inevitable when it does, that I reach for the seeds and the seed trays. I rinse out the cloches which will keep the surface of the seed trays from drying out. I set up my seed sowing bench in the shade outside the studio. This is gentle seed sowing, only maybe twelve trays, rather than the twenty plus at a time I do at other times of year. There is a field in full flower around me and so the sowing does not have that desperate longing feel of sowing in the winter. There’s a gentleness to it. I fill the seed trays, scatter the seed, cover gently and put the trays to one side. I look at them knowing that I’ve just committed to another year of growing flowers for sale. It’s a bitter-sweet feeling: another year incoming of relentless focus on ground prep and counting plants per metre, the feel of pushing endless full barrow loads of mulch, one per two metres and we have a thousand running metres of bed, so five hundred barrow loads of mulch to push, the tension between being pleased we have flowers in the field and the need to get them sold so that there’s money to pay the electricity bill (and the rest!) in the account. Sowing seed in June is a declaration of faith in the future: that the sun will rise, the rain will fall, the seeds with germinate, grow on and after the long winter months that I’m afraid are ahead, they will flower next spring. Sowing seed in June is a decision that yes, I will have flowers for sale in 2026, and I hope the people of south east Somerset, west Wilts, and north Dorset will be in the market to buy them.
Happy British Flowers Week all.
And what’s your favourite British flower? Do take a picture of your fave and share wherever you share on social media tagging British Flowers Week - as you’ll see from this clip, I couldn’t choose. Hopeless!
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