How it all began, part 1

Meet your flower farmer!

This story is one of two half’s, but together they make a very wonderful whole.

Hi! My name is Gina and I’m the founder of Roots & Bloom. I’m a creative, slightly scatterbrained, garden loving girl with a passion for all things floral. Growing flowers makes me happy and I’m truly convinced of their restorative, mood boosting powers. There’s nothing quite like nurturing tiny seeds and helping them grow into bright, cheerful blooms to lift your spirits! I find that flowers have a quiet way of bringing people together too. Whether it’s reminiscing with your grandparents about the plants they’ve grown over the years, hunting in the garden with your little ones, or simply ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the latest floral Pinterest trends with your girlfriends, flowers have the ability to speak to people of all ages.

I come from a family of talented gardeners and grew up playing in my Grandmas beautiful garden. I spent countless days trampling through her flowerbeds, picking all her best flowers to make wonky arrangements with. My favourite game was swapping all the labels in her greenhouse, a game that I’m sure was only fun for one of us! She and my dad taught me about growing all sorts of plants and instilled a deep love of nature in me, but I didn’t realise what a gift this would be until years later!

Fast forward 30 years… I rediscovered my love of gardening after realising how great it is for my mental health, and have been growing cut flowers for around 3 years now. I’ve come a long way in that time! I didn’t know that I wanted to be a flower farmer when I first started out (thankfully, or I might have given up!) and was content pottering about in my little garden.

600 seedlings, wiped out in an instant! (Yes, I cried.)

I had a pretty disastrous start, killing nearly everything I sowed and only having a handful of cut flowers to show for my first year. (Here’s a picture of The Great Greenhouse Massacre, just in case you don’t believe me!) I was deflated, but not deterred! Having been bitten by the flower growing bug, and being fed up with the solitude of running my previous business from home, I started looking at flowers as a way to build a life that I really loved.

There are three rules that I always follow in my garden. Using sustainable methods, building healthy soil and doing as little damage to the environment as possible are always my guiding principals. I started thinking, what if I could do this on a larger scale, and give people an alternative to the chemical laden, lackluster, imported flowers that we’re all so used to buying?

And so the seed was planted, but it wasn’t until my love of gardening and another part of my life collided that I really knew what I had to do!

Read part 2 here, that’s where the magic happens!