Heather Staten
ARTS + CULTURE
From Seed to Vase
Tim Ortlieb
The art of flower farming grows organically for Hood River’s Heather Staten story by DON CAMPBELL | photos provided
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Both images by Heather Staten
e humans have an innate and powerful impulse to put ourselves in nature. Be it forest, field or river, or mountaintop, meadow or glade, we are compelled to seek that from which we’ve come — the wild world. There emerged in the ‘80s an esoteric thesis of philosophic science called biophilia, espoused by Harvard naturalist Dr. Edward O. Wilson, who offered that we possess “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.”
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SPRING 2021 II THE GORGE MAGAZINE
For Heather Staten, that urge manifests itself in a half-acre plot of some 250 varieties of flowers that she plants for not only the benefit of her family, friends and clients, but for her very soul. Staten is into her fourth year of Heather’s Flower Farm, a labor of love that started with growing flowers on the 18-acre idyll that she cohabits with husband, musician and luthier Ben Bonham, and their two children. “I love having flowers in the house,” says Staten, who in another part of her life is the executive director of Thrive Hood River. “But I didn’t like cutting things. The yard didn’t look as good.” She happily tumbled down what she describes as a rabbit hole of growing an intentional cutting garden where, she says, “I could hack away and take whatever I wanted.” As in many aspects of her life, her eyes were bigger than her practicality, and she grew way too much. The natural outgrowth of that was outletting her surplus to a first-iteration business in the form of a 10-person bouquet subscription service. “I loved it!” she says. “The next year I tripled
