Tales From A Farmer Florist

A new weekly story of my adventures starting a floral business.

Hello my flower loving friends, I have something new for you. I’ve decided to write a weekly story of my history of when I decided to change career and make a business from flowers. I just thought this would be a really interesting topic and a good catch-up for those of you that are new here. Oh btw these pictures are of my first bouquet I made at floristry class back in 2016 I think. So here we go…

It all started when I had to give up hairdressing. I’d been a hairdresser for 20 years or so, I was a college lecturer and I owned my own salon. Before my girls were born I did 50hr weeks and took hardly any breaks, roll on a couple of decades and my shoulder completely gave out on me. I couldn’t even lift the kettle or raise my arm it had got so bad. I had to give up hairdressing, life as I had known it was over and I had to start again. I didn’t really know what to do but I had a passion for interiors and antiques so I studied interior design for a year, a foundation course. Whilst I enjoyed it I realised pretty early on it wasn’t for me. I enjoy interiors but I hate being given a brief or being told what to do. So I started a business hiring out my antique props for events and weddings. I was feeling a lot better by this point and my customers were asking me to style their events for them. I remember visiting a bride for a consultation, I was dressing her tables with antique china. When I asked her what centre pieces she was having she said she’d grab stuff from the garden, when I looked in her garden there was just grass, her mother also gave me the knowing eye, let me do the flowers for you I said- and that was the very start of my love affair with growing flowers for cutting.

That wedding saw me pick every flower from my own garden to make simple gathered displays, they were beautiful and I adored the outdoor feel it gave to the space. I absolutely fell in love with the idea of becoming a florist. It was my first real aha moment since becoming a hairdresser, it just felt right!

As soon I’d finished that wedding I booked myself an intensive floristry one-to-one class with Sarah who owned The Cambridge Flower School. I was a kid in a sweet shop- only the sweets the flowers, all lined up in buckets for me to pick from. It was a great way to learn as I could choose exactly what topics I wanted to cover.

My first bouquet was big and flowing, it had a kind of wildness to it and that was where my name came from, A Bunch Of Wild.

The trouble was…

Join me next Sunday for the next instalment of tales from a farmer florist.

Emma x