It’s worth remembering that we’ve only just begun

Photo by Blake Wisz on Unsplash

The line between being provocative and off-putting is a fine one. I’ve been trying to stay on the right side of it, leading recent discussions about the future of the seasonal flower industry.

It's felt like walking a tightrope - asking challenging questions like “are we being delusional about the viability of flower farming?” while trying to hold out a safety net of practical support for people who see their future in growing and selling flowers as a commercial venture.

Weaving through comments, emails and transcripts of conversations, there's a pattern is emerging that is both reassuring and exciting.

In my opinion, the seasonal flower industry in New Zealand and Australia has a brighter future than some people might think.  

Joining the global movement of seasonal flower growers that started in the northern hemisphere, it was natural we’d look to there for guidance. Over time it started to feel like the rest of the world has figured out something we haven’t yet. 

In fact, our work as floral upstarts is just beginning, the opportunity for the taking is to claim our place in the flower world - legitimately, deliberately, and on our own terms.

Our place in the floral industry

Seasonal flower farmers are creative pragmatists and idealists, not industrialists. We are makers and crafters - growers who work with the seasons, with the land, with our hands, and with an attention to quality, provenance and contributing to our communities.

Our closest comparators aren’t the big commercial flower growers, we have more in common with market gardeners who rebuilt the local food movement from the ground up - direct to consumer, provenance-led, community-rooted, premium by nature. 

Craft brewers are another good reference point. They took small-batch beer making to a whole new level - building a new culture of appreciation around flavour, story and the pleasure of knowing where your drink came from. Industrialised brewers had abandoned all of that, the craft producers claimed it back.

In the UK, flower farmers are actively claiming British Flowers as a collective identity - a provenance mark that tells consumers something meaningful about what they’re buying. In New Zealand and Australia, our equivalent claim is still being built but the territory is clear: local, seasonal, sustainably grown flowers with a story and a face behind them.

Specialist cut-flower growers have a genuine commitment to quality and service as we do, but the scale at which they grow and sell has commoditised their floral products. In fact, the colloquialism for flowers with florists, wholesalers and auctioneers is 'product'. I rest my case!

For me, productisation of flowers creates a gap between what's natural about flowers and the emotional connection they have with people.

What’s different about smaller-scale flower farming is that we are growing flowers more like nature intended with the care and attention that makes all the difference to how people enjoy them.

What we call ourselves matters

Language shapes how people understand what we do - and how confidently we can talk about it.

What we call ourselves determines how we price our work, how we walk into a room of florists or buyers or market customers, and whether we claim our space with confidence or apology.

For too long, growers have reached for whatever term was available - or accepted the ones handed to them - without thinking carefully about what those terms actually communicate.

Two terms have emerged to describe the scope of what we do as seasonal growers: Flower Farmer and Garden Grower.

Each describes a deliberate practice, a relationship with the land, a skill set built over seasons - without diminishing the grower by the size of their business. Both carry the authority of craft.

A Garden Grower isn’t a lesser Flower Farmer. Both are doing an equally legitimate thing, with their own aesthetic, their own customers, and their own definition of a sustainable business.

Naming yourself accurately - and claiming that name with confidence - is one of the most practical things you can do for your business. It changes the conversation before you’ve said anything else.

Telling our own story clearly lets us shape how we are understood - on our own terms, not someone else’s. A recent comment in a Facebook group for flower growers and florists opined that “professional florists don’t use flowers from their garden… they only use top quality professionally grown, lasting varieties, this avoids quality complaints.”

The implication was that 'garden or backyard' growers don’t supply top quality flowers. That view is outdated - but it persists because we haven’t yet made our case loudly or collectively enough. The clearer we are about who we are and what we offer, the harder that kind of dismissal becomes to sustain.

The full scope of what a floral business can be

Growing flowers doesn’t put a ceiling on what your business is allowed to become.

The Farmer Florist grows what they sell and sells what they grow - taking creative and commercial control of the whole chain from seed to arrangement. It’s one of the most powerful commercial positions in this industry: premium pricing, direct customer relationships, and a skill and story made visible in a way that buying from a wholesaler or floral reseller never quite achieves.

Yet, there’s an identity hesitation that stops some growers from adopting the mantle of florist. It can feel like crossing a line - like admitting that growing alone isn’t enough, or going head-to-head with the floristry establishment. It isn’t either of those things. 

Choosing to arrange and sell flowers you grow is a new kind of florist, a new kind of floral business. Plus being a grower florist doesn’t mean you can only sell what you grow.

Buying in flowers from other growers - to extend your season, fill gaps in your range, or maintain a consistent market presence year-round - isn’t a compromise. It’s a legitimate business strategy that also contributes to the success of the wider industry.

What matters is being transparent with your customers about where the flowers come from, and sourcing from growers whose standards you respect.

My own business, The Pickery, has been built on this model. We grow our own flowers but also buy in from other growers to fulfil orders and serve customers year-round. Year-round availability has become a genuine commercial asset - and we value the collegiality that comes from working alongside other growers.

Diversification is the model, not the backup plan

The clearest pattern across all our conversations with seasonal growers is this: nobody generating a comfortable income is doing it from growing cut flowers alone.

Some people read that as a failure of the industry. It isn’t, it is a defining characteristic of boutique businesses.

For most of us, cut flowers are the anchor. Everything else is built around what you can actually deliver, what your market will support, and what makes the whole thing financially and operationally sustainable for you.

The combinations include cut flowers alongside tuber and bulb sales, dried flowers, plants and seedlings, workshops and education, farm experiences and events, floristry, and wholesale supply to florists. Others pair flower growing with separate employment while they build and all of it is legitimate.

There is no blueprint for a floral business The right combination depends on your land, your market, your skills, your life stage and your own definition of success.

Most seasonal flower growers are running micro and small-scale operations - businesses built at the scale one person or a small team can sustain personally, financially and operationally. That represents the evolution of many creative businesses. 

Most local economies are driven by small and medium enterprises. Flower businesses are part of that ecosystem - not a footnote to the large-scale producers. It’s time to stop conflating commerciality with scale.

Women are shaping this industry - and that matters more than you might think

This doesn’t get said often enough, so let’s say it plainly.

The seasonal flower industry is largely a feminist movement, built predominantly by women - women who built businesses while juggling families and other careers.

They spotted an opportunity, backed themselves, and figured it out largely alone - because the business advice available to them was designed for a different kind of business and life.

This is not just a point of pride. It changes how we should think about sustainable businesses in this industry.

When we talk about whether flower farming can work economically, we’re also talking about whether women who’ve invested their creativity, their land, their time and their courage into building something can achieve genuine economic independence from it.

That’s why the FBA exists. Not just to help growers grow better flowers or sell more - but provide the collective support that makes economic independence genuinely possible for the women who’ve chosen this path.

When we say this industry deserves to be taken seriously, we are also saying that the women building flower businesses deserve to be taken seriously. Those two things are connected.

Of course, men play an important role in this industry - as business partners, or supporting behind the scenes and as growers in their own right. But they are outnumbered and the growth of this industry has been led predominantly by women. That's worth saying clearly, and worth building around.

Regenerating nature is at the core of what we do

People are increasingly concerned about the impacts of climate change, the degradation of biodiversity, and the ways large-scale industrial production undermines local economies. Seasonal flower farming sits on the right side of all three of those concerns.

Most flower farmers in this community are growing with the land rather than against it with no-till or low-till practices, reduced synthetic inputs, attention to soil health, habitat for pollinators, water management that works with local conditions. These aren’t just ethical choices, they’re  the growing practices that produce flowers with the provenance story that flower buyers are increasingly looking for.

The environmental case for locally grown flowers is real. Imported cut flowers travel thousands of kilometres in refrigerated freight, are treated with chemicals at the border, and arrive having already consumed significant energy in their production and transport. A bunch of flowers grown in your region, cut fresh, and delivered that day has a fraction of that footprint.

Florists who have committed to foam-free, seasonally sourced, provenance-led design are already making this argument to their own customers. Growers who can articulate the same story - about soil health, about reduced chemical inputs, about what it means for flowers to travel twenty kilometres rather than twenty thousand - are speaking the same language as their most natural trade partners.

We may be small players in the world of flowers. But our contribution - to soil health, to biodiversity, to local economies, to the cultural practice of growing things with care - is genuinely significant. And it is a contribution that industrial-scale production, however well-intentioned, cannot replicate.

This is part of what we mean when we say we are building something different. Not just a different business model. A different relationship between flowers, land and community.

Collectivism is what comes next

An industry built on many small enterprises doesn’t have to be a fragmented one.

The craft beer movement didn’t succeed because individual brewers got better at brewing in isolation. It succeeded because brewers built a collective identity, shared standards, educated consumers together, and created a category the mainstream market eventually couldn’t ignore. The market gardening and artisanal food producer movement did the same for local and specialist food.

The seasonal flower industry in NZ and AU would benefit from a similar shift.

That means collegiality between growers - a culture of sharing knowledge, supporting each other’s businesses, and building the relationships that make collective action possible. It means shared standards that protect the integrity and quality of what this industry offers, while remaining inclusive enough that growers at every scale can participate whether they are field farmers or garden growers.

Professionalism in this industry is defined by behaviour and intention, not acreage. Hobby growers can be professional. You only need to look at specialist plant breeders and sellers that operate as small businesses - to understand that small scale and serious are not mutually exclusive.

It also means building genuine relationships with larger industry players - not as the junior partner who accepts whatever the bigger industry decides, but as growers who bring something different to the table and are valued for it.

Large-scale growers and small-scale artisan producers are not natural enemies. They serve different markets, offer different things, and there is more to be gained from working alongside each other than from competing. The same is true of our relationship with florists.

The business ecosystem we're building from within

The flower industry is generating its own support infrastructure - and that’s a valuable development.

There are now growers who’ve developed seedling brokerages and propagation services. Marketing services run by people who actually understand the seasonal flower context. Education and training built from real growing experience rather than generic business principles.

The FBA itself is built from the ground up by growers for growers, designed around the specific realities of seasonal production in NZ and AU.

Grower collectives that reach buyers by working together. Online directories that let buyers find local growers in ways that weren’t possible before. Alliances with seed, bulb and plant suppliers who actively support the work of small-scale growers - all make seasonal flower businesses more sustainable financially and operationally.

The more this industry can rely on resources built specifically for it - rather than on generic business advice, horticulture courses that don’t address small-scale flower production, or marketing platforms designed for retail brands - the stronger it becomes.

Better options are being built, from within and that is strengthening our sector.

Advocacy - speaking with one voice

Individual growers working alone have limited power to influence the decisions that affect them most.

The proposed changes to import health standards in New Zealand - which could open the market to significantly more imported flower supply - are a live example of why a coherent industry voice matters. Individual growers responding individually to policy consultations have far less impact than a community that speaks together, with consistent messaging and a clear sense of what it stands for.

The same applies to consumer advocacy. Building public understanding of what locally grown, seasonally produced flowers offer - in quality, freshness, provenance and environmental impact - requires sustained collective messaging that no individual grower can sustain alone.

A brand mark that unites the artisan flower industry in NZ and AU - something that works the way British Flowers does in the UK, or the way certified organic marks work in food - is a realistic long-term goal. It would give consumers a reliable signal, give growers a shared identity to stand behind, and give the industry a collective voice that decision makers and media can engage with.

That’s not a distant aspiration. It’s the logical next step for an industry that has done the hard work of building itself from the ground up.

Where we are

The seasonal flower industry in New Zealand and Australia is young, with most businesses still finding their shape. The culture around locally grown flowers is still forming because the collective infrastructure is still being built.

From the inside, that lack of a coherent bigger picture can feel precarious - especially when you’re trying to grow your reach and make the numbers work.

What we’ve learned hosting the FBA is that asking uncomfortable questions - about viability, about what we call ourselves, about what it really takes - doesn’t produce simple answers. That’s the point. There is no blueprint.

The beating heart of the FBA is the people in this community - the growers figuring things out week-to-week and season-to-season. It feels like our work is just beginning, as we help the seasonal flower industry move into its next phase.

True floral upstarts don’t just participate in this industry. They contribute to it.

It’s been good to hear from so many of you over these past weeks. The conversation doesn’t stop here.

If you had to pick one of these thing that would make the biggest difference to the seasonal flower industry next season - what would it be?

Drop your ideas in the comments. I’d genuinely like to know what you think.

Written by: Julie Treanor - Owner of The Pickery and co-creator of The Floral Business Activator who cannot shake off the feeling that the seasonal flower industry is destined for greater things!

Follow Julie on Instagram @thepickery