8 minute read
FROM SEED TO VASE
Heather Staten
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The art of flower farming grows organically for Hood River’s Heather Staten
story by DON CAMPBELL | photos provided
We 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.”
Both images by Heather Staten
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
Heather Staten, right, stumbled into flower farming after continually expanding her own cutting garden. She’s now in her fourth season of selling flowers.
my field space.” That forced a subscription service for 30 and selling bouquets at the Hood River Farm Stand. She doubled the next year, and on it goes into her fourth pro season as a flower farmer.
Staten’s love of growing and gardening started young. Growing up in Loudoun County, Va., outside Washington, D.C., she gardened as a chore for her parents and the family’s 20-acre farm, which was, she says, “a ‘70s, back-to-theearth farm.” She kept her hands in the earth through college and well beyond.
These days, she’s gearing up for a Covid-informed season — unsure of business, but still locked in the love of what she does. “Starting a business in your fifties, it’s to make yourself happy,” she says. She spends what she calls the “dreamy” part of the year, November and December, with seed catalogs and the whimsy of what she hopes to accomplish. By January, she’s got seed trays going, doing some dead prep, and planting bulbs and perennials. Spring is now nigh and planting will be in full progress, heading toward a summer of well-timed blooms, which will find their way to vases for tabletop enjoyment, wedding and elopement adornment and other event display.
If it were a deep-money enterprise, she’d plant what’s called mono-crops, like acres of sunflowers or other singular large plantings. But she resonates differently. “It’s not just growing flowers,” she says, “but arranging them.” Mostly self-educated, she offers her customers a large variety of blooms from which to work in order to deliver a carefully curated selection of plants and arrangements.
“I like making the recipe for what I’m going to pick that week,” she says.
Tim Ortlieb
“I’m a fanatic for color.” Maybe broody with burgundy, or bridal with brighter shades, which she plots and plans as she walks through her tightly clustered growing area, attuning herself to what’s maturing and at what stage.
While her now college-aged kids have helped and will continue to do so, and husband Ben lending his tool skills to various projects including rerouting an irrigation system, this is the first season she’ll hire extra help, including not only an actual employee, but several felines to help control a growing gopher and vole problem.
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Staten pays tight attention to the health of her alluvial soil along the banks of the Hood River. She uses sustainable practices akin to organic farming that are rooted in the notion that healthy soil leads to healthy plants. She practices “no-till,” a style that means she doesn’t disturb the soil biome by plowing her fields every year, and feeds that soil compost, cover crops and natural fertilizers that include seaweed extract and rich manure collected from the family’s flock of chickens.
The sheer number of floral varieties inhibits pests and encourages bees and other vital insects. She absolutely avoids the use of chemicals. “Imported conventionally grown flowers are often doused in [chemicals],” she says. “When someone gets a bouquet, often the first thing they do is hold it to their nose and take a big sniff. With local flowers, it’s not just that they aren’t sprayed with chemicals to help them survive shipping from thousands of miles away, they are more beautiful and multi-dimensional.”
Staten admits to being romanced by scent. “It’s such an elusive pleasure because even highly scented flowers lose their fragrance in a short amount of time,” she says. “Most supermarket flowers have no scent at all, so when people get a bunch of freshly cut sweet peas, they are transported by the loveliness of their smell.” Her flower farm uplifts in other ways, too. An inveterate over-extender, she finds having her hands deep in the dirt is a nice contrast to her job at Thrive, a grassroots watchdog group that keeps an eye on land use and livability issues, which can be controversial and trying at times. “Working with plants is regenerative,” she offers, “because by nature I’m an introvert. Thrive makes me be with people, but then I get to be with plants and dirt.”
She enjoyed an unexpected uptick in business last summer, with people trapped at home and craving something beautiful, like flowers. As well, not seeing loved ones, people tended to give more flowers to the loved ones they couldn’t visit. And she was ready.
This summer is a giant unknown. But for Heather Staten, it gets back to her biophilic nature, which for her is “waking up in the morning and visiting my baby plants,” she says. “Every morning. It makes me feel so good. Visiting baby plants is the most nurturing feeling out there. It’s a cliché to talk about being in tune with the seasons, but it’s like the return of an old friend.” For more information, go to heathersflowerfarm.com.
Don Campbell is a writer and musician. He hides out at a secret fortress on a hilltop in Mosier and is a frequent contributor to The Gorge Magazine.
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