From Vogue and John Galliano to Flower Farming: Georgie Newbery’s Career

Like many flower farmers I had a career before I got into growing cut flowers for sale. Mine started in Paris where I worked for American Vogue and John Galliano, before I started writing novels and then developing television programmes. I started growing cut flowers for sale in my 40s when I had moved to the country, and found myself married with small children and needing a way to make my garden work for its living. Flowers from the Farm was founded the year after I started growing cut flowers for sale and it has been a great support for cut flower growing businesses ever since.

I saw some Flowers from the Farm colleagues, Bek and Jen of Blooming Green when they were on the television on a programme called My Dream Farm with Monty Don. They had just broken ground for their first flower growing area and I was very inspired by what they were doing. Then a neighbour sent me a bouquet of flowers through the post, and I had another lightbulb moment: I would grow bouquets and send them around the country by post.

I always tell people when I teach that their cut flower growing business will evolve and evolve and keep evolving. Common Farm Flowers is typical of that in that we started growing flowers to send bouquets around the country, slowly made a reputation for ourselves as creators of local wedding flowers at the same time, and we always held workshops here on the farm because people love to learn and arrange flowers: why should the flower farmer have all the fun? Now, sixteen years in we grow flowers for a great many events and weddings through each summer season, nearly all DIY mixed buckets, and for a hyper-local market, and I teach lots of workshops, both sustainable floristry and business, here at the farm and online for students all around the world.

A successful flower farmer is not necessarily made from extensive qualifications. A successful flower farmer has a clear business plan, a cashflow forecast based in reality, and a strong objective, a WHY, which will get them out of bed and keep them energetically pursuing their purpose no matter the weather, the government, the temptation to stay indoors. Marketing is still over fifty percent of the job. Flowers from the Farm has a growing education programme to help members learn more about business, about quality standards, about marketing.

I’m a great believer in learning: watch YouTube clips, take part in workshops, go on courses, read books and keep on learning in order to keep interested. Like any occupation, running a business as a cut flower farmer is one at which one will become adept over years. Keeping learning keeps the process interesting. However, no training would have taught me that I was about to embark on a business with such strong purpose, that it is the philosophy behind that purpose which frames all the business decisions we make. Here at Common Farm Flowers we look after the environment first, and the business must pay for that. The business cannot cost the environment. It must put back into the land more than it takes from it. Flowers from the Farm too has a strong sustainability policy and has recently published its stance on Climate Change.

The pandemic was terrifying. I thought we would go bust. But our customers were incredible and it was the busiest time I ever had as a flower farmer. It was a time of opportunity as well, however. We couldn’t hold our workshops here at the farm and so we took them online, and that experience has meant that students from around the world can join in with what we do. After the pandemic we decided to shrink the business: we stopped sending bouquets by courier around the country, and made what we do hyper local. Now we no longer do big installation weddings. Instead I love working with my diy brides. In the future I’m sure we’ll do more wholesale. Nothing stays the same.

Mondays are my admin day. Invoicing, bill paying, book keeping, getting back to enquiries. I’m usually in my flower studio trying to get everything done so I can get outside. Working with the UK flower farmer’s trade organisation Flowers from the Farm means there are more meetings and discussions than before, but it’s so interesting working on behalf of the British flower farming community, advocating for flower farmers with government and other stakeholders. Being External Chair of Flowers from the Farm is hard work and time consuming but it has added a whole layer of interest to my day to day.

Flowers from the Farm is the trade organisation for UK cut flower farmers. It has three pillars of activity: to encourage and support flower farmers to grow more high-quality cut flowers and foliage; to spread the word about flower farming so that customers can easily buy more, and to advocate with stakeholders. The organisation has a paid membership of over eleven hundred flower farmers, and is growing all the time. As part of the board I’m involved in decisions re how best we can move the organisation forward, all the time advocating for our members. It’s very different from running my own business where I can make any decision I like even on a whim. Flowers from the Farm is very much driven by the membership, and we work closely with that membership, a broad mix of modest businesses run from back gardens, to those growing cut flowers for sale on acres of land.

The board of Flowers from the Farm has worked very hard to achieve a Standard Industrial Classification code for flower farming in the UK. This means that Flower farming is recognised as its own sector of the British economy. But the government says it won’t make that code active until 2031. So there’s work to do there. I’m sixty next year. I don’t intend to retire. Flower farming is a business you can scale up or back to suit your capacity. As I get older and my kids leave home and hopefully I don’t have such heavy financial needs to pay for every day family life I will be able to scale back but still keep growing. After all, I’ve never heard of anyone who grows too few sweet peas: I’ll always have some flowers and foliage for sale.

As AI takes over some of the more mundane jobs, people will have to use their initiative looking for careers which a computer can’t do. Growing cut flowers for sale is a physical business, requiring imagination and creativity as well as strength. Into 2027 I’m told by friends who work in trend forecasting people will be looking for real community, to buy real products from real people. Flower growing is all about the people who grow as well as the flowers. Flower fields are places where people can take time out from the online whirr and step into a real world of perfect beauty. So many opportunities for people to get into cut flower growing, and so many kinds of products they can grow: from dried, to edible, to wedding, to market, to fields where people come and pick their own.

If you want to make a career in growing cut flowers for sale see if you can find a farmer who will let you work for them and learn. Watch all the YouTube, read all the books. Research your potential market and decide who you will be growing for and what they’d like you to grow. Make a business plan: a page of objectives, a page of research, and a cashflow forecast based on how much you need to live on.

Growing cut flowers is lovely. Being outside and planting is lovely. In order to carry on doing that you need to sell those flowers. And that’s time consuming. It helps if you are also interested in sales and marketing if you plan to grow cut flowers for sale.

When I started growing cut flowers for sale, I could count on one hand the colleagues I could find. I now have five flower farms operating within ten miles of Common Farm Flowers here in Somerset. The number of flower growers has grown along with the market. The growth in number of farms means I no longer have to grow it all: I can specialise. This takes the pressure off me, and makes our businesses very collaborative. As the industry professionalises, and the demand can rely on us growers to be able to supply more and more, the number of stems being grown and sold by us flower farmers increases dramatically year on year. With members of the organisation like Jen of The Bristol Flower Company developing a flower tracker app to track flower harvests, we are able to see, year on year how the membership are growing more high quality cut flowers and foliage and selling more and more to a market hungry for locally grown flowers.

I think it depends on the size of the business. The more of an individual variety of flower you grow the more you are likely to sell wholesale. If you’re growing fifteen varieties of cut flower and foliage on your field in a year in large numbers, the wholesale market is ready for you. If you’re growing on a smaller space, or as a side-hustle, you’re likely to be growing a more bespoke service. If you love people, retail, love growing and hate admin, wholesale. This is a business to suit anyone who wants to grow cut flowers for sale, no matter the scale. And Flowers from the Farm is there to support all the growers, whatever the size of their operation.