About me
I’m an ecologist and artisan flower farmer. I grow beautiful, bee-friendly flowers from my English country garden in Woodbridge, close to the Suffolk Heritage coastline.
As a childhood fan of Enid Blyton, I’d always dreamed of secret gardens behind flaking red-bricked walls and English farmhouse cottage gardens. The types of gardens with unruly wisteria, honeysuckle, and rambling roses, and with billowing abundant borders of beautiful, scented English flowers. It’s this nostalgic, wistful, and untamed style of gardening that guides the kinds of flowers I grow in my cutting garden today, and which have most influenced my style of slow-flower growing and arranging. I now grow masses of varieties of British flowers and foliage and constantly trial new ones to ensure I’m growing cultivars that love my soil and conditions, thus requiring little help to be at their glorious best.
The farm
The farm sits on 5 acres of rich, moisture-retentive clay in the beautiful village of Hasketon, in Woodbridge, Suffolk. We’re partly moated, flanked to one side by ancient woodland and surrounded by native hedgerows.
Consequently, we have an abundance of wildlife that thrives in the huge diversity of habitats we provide, and because of the ecological principles at the heart of our growing. The fields hum and fizz with the drowsy bees which inspired our name. We host masses of beneficial insects, butterflies and moths, croaking toads, and crested newts. In the summer you’ll find dragonflies the size of your hand, and diverse birdlife from garden birds to prey species such as buzzards, owls and kites. Of course, we have pests too, but because we grow with nature we strive to have everything in balance…
