‘Get growing’: two city farmers explain how to cultivate your own flowers

theguardian.com:

‘People just need to try it,” says Camila Romain, one half of urban flower farming duo Wolves Lane Flower Company. “We get emails from people saying, ‘I want to do the learning, and then I want to start’; we’re always trying to get them to just get growing.”

Romain and her business partner Marianne Mogendorff are passionate about British-grown cut flowers. Taking its name from the north London street where they set up shop in 2017, the business has evolved from a flower farm offering local, organically cultivated and subscription-delivered bouquets of seasonal flowers – from dahlias and cornflowers to nicotiana – to a micro wholesaler selling direct to florists.

The first things they grew were cornflowers. “Cornflowers give you a lot of confidence; it’s good to start with something easy like that, rather than something fussy, like bupleurum, that you’d probably spend a lot of time crying about,” says Romain. Other flowers sown that first year were cosmos, zinnias and sunflowers.

For first-time flower growers, Mogendorff suggests keeping things simple: “Maybe prioritise three easy crops rather than buying everything in the seed catalogues. Try something like a sweet pea: they germinate easily and overwinter just fine. Cultivars such as ‘Nimbus’ and ‘Wiltshire Ripple’ are real crowd-pleasers.” They also recommend the many newer cultivars of calendula, and the delicate white laceflower Orlaya grandiflora: “We dry it: the seed pod is beautiful, as well as the flower itself.”

Interestingly, it is the pastoral, hedgerow-like quality of these blooms that increases their value. “There is almost a fetishisation of nature and wildness in London,” says Mogendorff. “We provide a wild aesthetic that we’re all yearning for in the city.”