Flower farmer, florist, sustainability researcher, content creator - it's fair to say Roisin Taylor's calendar is booked and busy.
 
With hearts full of flowers and minds full of questions, we caught up with Roisin to talk all things blooms and best practices.

Describe your growing space

Verde Flower Co. is run out of a 2.2 acre walled garden near Bellingham in Northumberland, UK.
 
It was built in the 18th century and is south facing, with walls between 11 and 18 ft high. Part orchard and part traditional walled garden, our claim to fame is that the space was originally designed by the Capability Brown!

 

Verde Flower Co. was founded by your Mum, Caroline, in 2016. How did her love for growing pass down to you?

I basically grew up on my Mum's allotment but I wasn’t fantastically interested in flexing my green fingers until I was finishing up at university and Mum needed a spare pair of hands.
 
I started working alongside her, picking and conditioning flowers and assisting with wedding floristry. It wasn’t until 2020, though, that I started to see flower farming & floristry as a legitimate career. I'm still fearful that I don’t know enough or have enough experience - particularly now that I run the business on my own - but Mum taught me several very important lessons.
 
One is the old north-east saying,  ‘shy bairns get nowt’, meaning shy children get nothing, and the most important lesson of growing flowers: ‘it has two chances, live or die, so you might as well always just give it a go'.

 

Alongside Verde Flower Co., you're also a sustainability researcher & campaigner. Do you have any resilience tips for domestic gardeners?

• Buy local plants, grown from seed. These are more likely to be adapted to your local environment, meaning they'll have better odds of surviving tricky temperatures or droughts. You're also less likely to import pests and diseases and the plants will have generated enormously less production and travel emissions. 

  
• Explore perennials. Annual flowers are terrible at surviving climatic extremes. Perennials are much better at weathering (pardon the pun) drought, flooding, compaction and wind, and can generally tolerate less water and intervention. In the world of change ahead, perennials bring the colour, vitality and reliability that we crave.

  
• Buy peat-free compost. Or even better, make your own! Peat is a precious, non-renewable resource which keeps carbon locked in the ground and helps keep communities safe from flooding. This is an easy, essential switch to make. You should support the Peat Free Partnership, too - it's calling on the government to legislate for all compost to be peat free.

 

Most cut-flowers that we buy as consumers are shipped in from overseas. How can we better support UK growers?

Not all imported flowers are equal, and as a consumer, there is almost no way to know where they have been grown or in what conditions. 
 
The British flower industry is small - only 11% of flowers sold in this country are grown here! And yet we are the world's largest producers of certain crops like daffodils.
 
You can find local growers through Instagram or by using the Flowers From The Farm map. Buying local is a sure fire way to reduce the carbon footprint of your flowers and put your hard earned cash back into the economy.

 

As a flower farmer, which blooms are the most commercially popular?

A lot of my bridal clients love a wildflower bouquet with rich blue cornflowers, star-like nigella, sculptural grasses and something bold like a lupin. But my staples every year are tulips and dahlias. They're both crowd favourites, though I prefer to seek out interesting varieties which you won't find at your local supermarket or florist - something bold and different!

 

Setting reliability and profit aside, which are your personal favourite blooms to grow?

I love anything with multiple stages I can use. Nigella, for example, is super delicate and gorgeous as a cut flower, but then it creates beautiful seed heads for more sculptural work and you can collect the seeds for sowing again the following year.
 
I'm really leaning into perennials now, though, so white perennial phlox is a real love of mine. It's pure ivory white and attracts bees like nothing I've ever seen.

 

If somebody wants to start growing their own cut flowers but they're limited on space, which blooms are best?

Start small with 5-7 cut flowers and get really good at growing them. My favourites for plentiful blooms are cosmos, nigella, larkspur, cornflowers, ammi (majus or visnaga), corncockles and scabious.

 

Finally, any quick-fire growing tips?

• Check your final frost date - don't lose your seedlings because you were too quick off the mark!
• Grow what you love - you *will* ignore the things you don't care that much about.
• Growing should be about joy, so if that means an entire bed dedicated to grasses or a garden full of dahlias, go for it babe.
• Look after your hands, feet and body - you won't be doing any growing if your body is shot to bits. Look after yourself like youl look after your seeds and plants.
• Get comfortable with mess - it doesn't always (or ever) have to look neat and tidy. Embrace the wild side - it's better for you and nature.
  

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Find out more about Roisin's floristry business, Verde Flower Co.