Slowly, Slowly

Starting a Floral Business is personal

To own a small floral business—to start it from scratch—is quite the journey. To begin it while in the midst of a health issue added another element that I’m only just now beginning to reconcile. I began Parsley & Rue in late spring of 2024, while I was flat on my back, dealing with the significant pain of cervical radiculopathy caused by osteoarthritis in my spine, which was pressing on my C6 C7 nerves. This caused constant lightning-white-hot pain in my right shoulder blade, down the back of my arm, constellated around the back of my elbow, and then sent spiky tingles—like your foot when it’s gone to sleep and it’s first starting to awaken—into two fingers of my hand.  It was strange in that a problem in my spine wasn’t felt in my spine, but was felt in all those other places. The unrelenting nature of it cut deep into my psyche. I wanted to cut off the right side of my body. I wanted relief that wasn’t forthcoming nearly quickly enough from the medical providers. I wanted to be up and out and, especially, outside. 2024 was the first year in decades I hadn’t gardened. It was absolutely out of the question: walking, standing, sitting, bending, lifting, scooping: it was inconceivable. The pain made it so.

the power of flowers

February of 2024 is the lowest I’ve ever felt in my life. The pain was making me feel out of my mind. I took on a small interior design job so I wouldn’t completely lose it, doing the work from my back, in bed, my laptop teetering on my knees. I knew eventually something would be done that would make the pain stop, but it was very hard, that month, to believe it.  Yet I finished the design work. Then I looked out the window at the camellias which were budding out, revealing their deep magentas and light pinks, and….felt ever so slightly lighter. It was just a tiny shift; a shaft of light in a dark, dark time. I remember thinking how amazing, how nearly magical (or maybe entirely magical) it was to feel that tiny prick of relief from simply seeing flowers. It brought me back to my childhood of noticing clouds, trees, plants, flowers, animals, and my adulthood of rediscovering them with my children. It reminded me that plants have true power. They are not here by accident. And they could make someone, even at a very dark moment, feel a little bit better.

I think it was then, right then, that I gave myself permission to spend the rest of my life with flowers.

listening to your body

I set up the first iteration of Parsley & Rue’s website in June 2024, while I was recovering from surgery on my spine. For the month after the surgery my movements were strange by necessity. To work on the computer I had to get an external keyboard, and raise my laptop up to what seemed preposterous heights, so that I wouldn’t be flexing my neck to look down at the screen. Leaning forward was painful. Sitting down was a process. Standing up was, too. Sitting back down was difficult. It was odd: I’d had knee surgery when I was eighteen, an appendectomy and a radical hysterectomy, but with all of those surgeries I popped back into regular life quite quickly. This, though: although the recovery was less painful than my condition before surgery, I found myself surprised, over and over, that I couldn’t just get up and go. For awhile I had to be very intentional, and I had to slow down.

feeling different

In my family I’m the youngest, and I’ve always felt quite different than my three siblings. I’m the one who was always writing, drawing, into horses, a bit head-in-the-clouds. My siblings often teased me when I was young for being a “space cadet.”  I spent years as a child and then teen very introverted; in my own world.  But the reality is that I wasn’t a space cadet or really all that antisocial. I was just thinking of other things. Nature, usually. I remember once in high school driving in the car with a boy I had taken to the Tolo, and his mom.  As we drove the sky over the water was filled with heaven-like mounds of pink and gold-tinged clouds. The boy was talking about someone at school.  But I was so transfixed by the clouds that I pointed out how beautiful they were. There was an awkward silence, a stern look from the mom to the boy, and then his halting “Uh yeah—that’s….cool.”  I just wasn’t on the same wavelength as my peers. And the thing is I liked  my wavelength. I liked noticing the world around me. It just seemed, a lot of the time, that others didn’t think I should.

curiousity

 As an adult I sacrificed steady career development so I could be there for my kids. I tried to show them the many truly wonderous things the world had to offer them. Our toddler walks down the street could take hours, as they stopped at every dandelion, leaf, rock, pinecone, twig, flower.  Their wonder was one I recognized, and deeply respected.  Children start with such curiosity, and such keen observation skills. Everything is amazing. Everything is worth stopping for.  I think it’s a beautiful way to live. It’s just not the way most societal systems are set up to support. I often felt out of step with where the world seemed to think I should be, or with what the world seemed to feel I should be doing. It took years, and my kids getting older, and a seriously painful medical condition, for me to truly believe it was okay to be on my own weed-lined, grassy, wildflower-dotted, windy path.

getting started

Choosing my kids over work meant my career-building was just about as slow and stop-and-start as my recovery from spinal surgery. This has been a source of great consternation many, many times. And yet I knew if I had to do it again I’d pick my kids again, if I had to choose (and I did feel like I had to choose.) And so I found myself beginning Parsley & Rue at age 54. I’m a firm believer that age is just a number, and you’re as young as you feel.  The problem was, recovering from a year of pain, and then the surgery, I was feeling older than my 54 years. It was unsettling.  And yet I knew that the only way to get anywhere was to get started, and keep going.  Even if painfully slowly.

doing the work

Bodies heal, and mine did, albeit not into the same shape and form as prior to the start of the pain. Even as I write this, I can feel the distinct little “zing” in my right shoulder blade that tells me I need to get up soon, to get the pressure off my neck, from writing. I don’t have any bouquets or arrangements to make today, but if I did that’s what I would do: the change in position to standing, walking, carrying buckets, designing is usually all it takes to get the neck calmed down again. But today the work I need to do is all admin. I started the day with tax filing. I made two social media reels on Canva. I answered emails. I’ll need to get up and move anyway, even though the work I need to do is here, at the computer.  I’m not terrific at doing this, yet. I still feel I should be able to do my previous marathon sessions at the computer, writing, editing, doing graphic design and Excel sheets, taking care of the myriad of things that need to be taken care of when you have a small business.  But my body doesn’t give me an option, anymore. And so I get up and let the dogs out. Go out to the studio and take inventory of supplies. Sow more seeds. Water the seedlings that I’m counting on to start Parsley & Rue’s first floriography gardens. I mess with the grow lights and read up on memorial floristry, which I’m beginning to learn.  Then I come back, here, to the screen.

floral collaboration

There are so many things to juggle with a small floral business, just like there are with any business. The best results have come when I go out and meet with others in the industry. The recent Slow Flowers Summit was fantastic for this. Now I have a collaboration going with another relative new-to-the-industry florist, and with a fantastic local flower farmer. With the florist, she needed a place to run floral design workshops, and I have a little more space for doing that. We plan to try out our first collaborative workshop here at my studio this spring. With the flower farmer, I purchased several bundles of beautiful tulips for a floriography lecture I was to give that week, and we talked flower farming, future collaboration on a corporate flower workshop, and much more (I truly could have talked to her all day.) 

floral stories

There’s a common saying in this industry that flower people are the best people, and although I’m sure (and I hope!) others in other industries may say the same of their colleagues, I have to say I agree with this 100%. Every floral designer and flower farmer I’ve met has been so down to earth, and each has a story they are so willing to share. Often their paths to flowers were as circuitous as mine. So many worked as a nurse, teacher, administrator, coder, etc etc before turning to flowers. Some came to it after a loss, to heal. Some have always felt a connection to the earth, and the form it took became flowers.

Mine is a story of a love of language: of writing—seeing how words strung together create stories that create pictures in the mind of the reader—and an equal love of nature. I gravitate toward design of all types, and have a strong aesthetic. All of nature is truly lovely. But flowers—arguably the queens of aesthetic beauty-- capture the heart in a unique way. The fact they can be grown as a crop, and then designed as art, and then create emotion for the beholder—that’s something very special, is it not?  And then there’s the meaning of flowers: floriography. Delving into the history behind the meanings we give flowers is utterly fascinating to me, and when I combined it with floral design, something clicked into place. I want to grow flowers, design with flowers, and write about flowers and their meanings. It sounds so simple. And actually, it is that simple. To do it takes a lot of work. A lot of sweat and tears, as they say (I’ve shed so much of both). A lot of sitting down at the computer, and then standing up to work with the flowers. Down and up, up and down. Just like my spine needs me to do. There are days of seeing orders come in, or receiving wonderfully bolstering words from clients and customers---and many days of wishing orders would come in, or trying to figure out why they aren’t. A small floral business is easy to get lost in the big wide world: it has to be seen, it has to become known. Enough people need to trust that you can do what you say you can do, and you can deliver what they need you to deliver.  But, slowly, slowly, it sprouts, it gets its first true leaves…and it grows.