Artemis Flower Farm Tour and Interview

We're at Artemis Flower Farm. My name is Helen, this is my husband Nelson, and we've been on this property for about five years. And Artemis is a name, it's a Greek goddess. She's the goddess of the hunt, she's the goddess of the moon and the wilderness. Artemis represents this very primal, primordial part of our lives and our experience, and we chose that name because we feel like it embodies how we want to share the land with the wilderness and with the wild creatures. And I came into flowers as an accident. I was an intern on a small vegetable farm, and at the end of the season, the manager said, hey, our current flower person is leaving. Would you like to learn how to grow flowers and arrange them over the course of the winter? I was like, of course, how difficult could that possibly be? And turns out it's very hard, actually, especially in our climate. But what I found was that even though I didn't really choose it for myself necessarily, it kind of fell into my lap, I guess. I kept choosing it over and over. On a veggie farm, you might grow 12 families of crops, right, like your Solanaceae and Brassicaceae. On a flower farm, between your annuals and your perennials, you're probably growing more like 30 different families of plants, which is so cool. And so there's this huge biodiversity of plants, and there's a huge diversity in what you get to learn and know. And then the ways of cultivating flowers, helping them come to their best kind of evocation is really fascinating. I mean, there's just infinite learning to happen. It worked out well that we are growing flowers because I grew up in flowers, and we exported tulip bulbs from the Netherlands to the U.S., and we did that every six months back and forth. So I'd always grow up with tulips, but I didn't think I really wanted to do that as a career or anything. But I was in agriculture, in and out throughout my life, and flowers just kind of stuck. I love them. I think they're so beautiful, and they bring you into the present moment, and there's just nothing else that compares to that level of presence. Why is beauty important? Oh my gosh. What would we do without beauty? Why do we have art? Why do we have music? Why do we have any of the things that make our lives worth living? Flowers might seem like a superfluous, luxurious thing. It's unnecessary. But you can say that about any number of things that we do in our day-to-day lives. The way that human beings have come to cultivate flowers for specific aesthetic reasons, we've done a really good job of making them even more beautiful than they were in the wild. So they are kind of a pinnacle of human engineering at this point. Really, anything beautiful brings you into the present moment. When we're appreciating beauty, whether that is a piece of art or a piece of music or dance or, you know, anything that is really capturing all of us at once, that means to me that we're fully alive in that moment. The flowers help you get there because they have touch, scent, sight, smell. You can experience them with all of your senses. We can capture that presence, that beauty, and we can package it up in the best quality that we can and give them fresh to you. You'll have them for a long time, a lot longer than you would buying flowers at a grocery store, let's say, because those have been shipped over. Their carbon footprint is enormous. Growing flowers is a lot of hard work. And often when you see flowers, it may not look that hard because the beauty kind of captivates you and like, oh, these just grow out of the ground and there's nothing else to it. But I think there's a lot of hard work behind that and the effort to bring those flowers to market is a big one. And, but we do that because we love what we do and we want people to experience all of that.