We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Fran Parrish. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Fran below.

Fran, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I am a cut flower farmer and wedding florist in Western New York. I learned how to grow flowers by way of working in urban agriculture for several years. Later on, I learned how to design wedding floral and run a wedding florist business largely by teaching myself and learning from other people whose business models I admired.

I worked in urban agriculture and urban gardening in Detroit and Chicago for six years before starting my own business running a flower farm and wedding florist studio just north of Buffalo, NY.

In Detroit, where I am originally from, I landed a paid internship for a non-profit urban farming project with the local food bank where we grew food for underserved communities across Metro Detroit. This job was my first foray into farming and where I was ultimately inspired to ditch the idea of what traditional “work” is in the United States — that I could grow food for people in need and actually be paid to do so felt incredibly powerful. It was such purposeful, moving work and it changed the entire trajectory of my life. I graduated from Lawrence Technological University that year with an undergrad degree in Architecture. It was career path I ultimately did not pursue, but the architectural education I received helped inform my understanding of space and meaningful design, and it planted the first seeds of environmental sustainability in my mind that would ultimately blossom into the greater purpose for my flower farm.

In Chicago, I worked for an edible landscaping company where we designed, planted and maintained vegetable gardens in peoples’ backyards throughout the City of Chicago and the North Shore. I went from growing food for communities in need of service, to growing food for “the ladies and lords of the land,” as I not unkindly referred to the clientele at this new Chicago-based company. The work was incredibly engaging and at the end of my time there, I had grown in over 150 individual gardens. That huge amount of gardening experience inspired my desire to start writing a garden blog and, believe it or not, inspired my love of flowers.

When I started my flower farm, I did not have much experience growing flowers — I just had a feeling that I would love growing them and that I’d be able to turn them into something beautiful with my hands. Hence, my flower farm and wedding florist business was born. It is not a new business by any means. In 2018, when I started Heirloom Soul Florals, there were already tons of farmer-florists that existed all over the world. Thankfully, a wonderful membership organization known as the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers (ASCFG) offered tons of learning experiences for me to immerse myself in, such as recorded videos of past flower conferences; video tutorials for designing, selling, marketing and growing cut flowers; and a quarterly newsletter with tons of useful information that helped me feel like I was a part of a group.

If I could go back and speed up my learning process for flower farming, I honestly wouldn’t! The most effective learning experiences I’ve had on my farm have been from my own mistakes and then taking great notes or blogging about the experience after the fact. As inefficient as that sounds, farming is so unpredictable and every farm is different; you can’t simply follow what someone else is doing and avoid issues. I do spend countless hours every month reading books and watching videos to help further my understanding of growing cut flowers for profit. Continuous learning is so important in every endeavor, and it’s one of the reasons why I know I’ll never get bored doing what I do.

I would go back and speed up the learning process for running a business, though. There are things I wish I would have known earlier, such as understanding how to write a profit and loss statement and how to effectively communicate with customers, to serve them and then turn those customers into sales. That is a skill that is invaluable to every business owner.

The most essential skills for operating as a farmer-florist are determination/grit and being able to prioritize what is most important. When growing flowers for a living, there are so many ways to sell them and I see a lot of new growers in my industry trying to sell their flowers in dozens of different ways, all at once. Learning how to focus on a few sales outlets is a much more effective selling strategy. Also, farming is hard. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life — physically, mentally and emotionally. To run a profitable farm business, you have to be someone who can get right back up after being knocked down over and over again — it is that hard sometimes. And unfortunately, farming is only going to get harder as disastrous effects of climate change (drought, flooding, wildfires, water and air pollution, freshwater scarcity, wind storms, etc) become more frequent and intense. I’ll keep on doing this work, as sustainably as I can, for as long as I can, because nothing brings more meaning to my life!

Fran, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a cut flower farmer and wedding florist in Western New York. Since 2018, my intention has been to grow and design the most beautiful, environmentally responsible, non-exploitative products for my community.

I organically grow one acre of over 100 varieties of cut flowers and foliage. I plant, tend, harvest, and design for weddings using unique blends of textures, colors and shapes that are recognizable to my brand. My wedding clients receive a unique, environmentally sustainable design that has been curated with tender love and care, from the field to handheld bouquet.

Additionally, I sell buckets of bulk flowers and foliage for people who wish to DIY their own flowers for weddings and events. Flowers and foliage are harvested in the customers’ color palettes and I provide them with the freshest, most gorgeous and fragrant blooms and greenery they could source. My goal is to educate and inspire consumers to buy flowers from local farms instead of the grocery store or online mail-order retailers. The rest of the flowers in my field are offered to other local florists at wholesale pricing, so they can offer local flowers to their customers, too.

In winter months, I spend time writing in my flower farming blog at heirloomsoul.com/blog. I also sell dahila tubers on my website that have been organically produced on my farm. I ship my dahlia tubers across the United States to eager dahlia lovers, just in time for planting.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I utilize intentional, regenerative flower farming methods that encompass an ecological mindset. On my flower farm, I work hard to provide healthy wildlife habitat and increase biodiversity in both plant and animal life in my farm ecosystem.

Loving for and caring for the earth is a pillar of my purpose and work as a farmer-florist. I believe that beautiful, meaningful purpose produces beautiful, meaningful work.

I call my work ‘Heirloom Soul.’ Growing and tending plants using earth-loving, ecological methods is a ritual that is thousands of years in the making. I fondly think on this work as an heirloom tradition that has been passed through our bodies and souls, through countless generations of humanity. The part I play in the legacy of earth tenders is deep and meaningful, and I intend to do only good with this knowledge I carry in my bones.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

That not all of the steps can be followed perfectly. You have to do what’s right for your business, even when it goes against your own understanding of what is “right.”

Here’s what I mean by that.

In my journey to become a flower farmer, I envisioned myself doing everything in the least destructive, most environmentally sustainable way I possibly could. I only ever thought of “sustainability” in an environmental way (ie. keeping soil as healthy as possible by not tilling, among many other intentions). I never took into consideration my own sustainability as a farmer — that I am a human with a body that gets tired and will eventually wear out after years and years of working in agriculture. I had the mindset that I would NEVER till my soil using machinery (either a rototiller or tractor), and I was able to get away without tilling my soil for the first five years of flower farming. I expanded my farm in 2022 and at that point, it became unmanageable for me to open up new land without tilling the soil. It would have taken too long and it would have killed my body to dig all of it up by hand. So I purchased a tractor and a tiller attachment and I use it from time to time to open up new land. When I started out farming, never did I think I would be the owner of a tilling machine — something I’d so staunchly written against in my own farming blog. But now that I have a tiller, I am able to farm better, more efficiently, and I am also able to use it in a responsible manner. I till the soil once, then I never till it again. The harm that is caused is minimal, and time and my body are saved. I’m so grateful I swallowed my pride of identifying as a “regenerative farmer” and came to this conclusion!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.heirloomsoul.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/heirloomsoulflorals
• Facebook: facebook.com/heirloomsoul

Image Credits
all photos are my own