In the humid haze of an early summer morning, Ash Hobson Carr walks up and down rows of snapdragons and delphiniums, expertly snipping long stems of bright blooms. On the 6 acres in Highland Springs that she shares cooperatively with two other farming enterprises, Hobson Carr’s Hazel Witch Farm flower business is blooming.

So is Jenny and Paul Maloney’s Wind Haven Farm in King William County, where Jenny’s love of flowers went from a front-yard garden 10 years ago to a thriving wholesale flower business on an 11-acre farm with 7 acres in production.

“When I first got into [the local wholesale flower market], there was just me and one other guy,” Jenny Maloney says. “Now there are a slew of people selling wholesale. It has exploded in the last 10 years.”

“We are constantly out there harvesting,” says Britton Barbee, who with her husband, Walter, runs Prospect Hill Flower Farm, producing flowers on about 2 acres of an old cattle farm in Louisa County. “I was surprised at the demand.”

From Bumpass to Williamsburg, from Mechanicsville to Powhatan, everything’s coming up not roses, but dahlias, cosmos and zinnias as flower farmers reclaim a beautiful business.

Once flower farms in the United States were prolific, particularly in California. Then, in 1991, the U.S. implemented the Andean Trade Act, which removed tariffs for 13 years on South American agricultural products. The intent was to limit coca farming, the key ingredient in cocaine, in Colombia and create jobs in a country ravaged by Civil War.

The United States is still the world’s largest consumer of cut flowers. But now most of those blooms come from Colombia. It’s the largest producer of cut flowers in the world, exporting more than 660 million stems in 2020.

U.S. flower farmers suffered another blow when the United States signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992, eliminating trade barriers with Canada and Mexico. “The trade agreement made it cheaper to ship in cut flowers from outside the United States than to get them from inside the U.S. Tons of large commercial flower farms went under or moved abroad,” Jenny Maloney said.

As the local food movement has grown in the U.S. and consumers are becoming more aware of the environmental and financial costs of a global food system, American flower farms are making a comeback. Flowers can be grown almost anywhere and require less gardening space than vegetables.

“My first garden was a terra-cotta pot garden. I had a big window but no access to outside space,” says Hobson Carr, who left a career as a globe-trotting photographer to settle into her passion for flowers and medicinal herbs. “Then we moved into a row house in the Fan and I filled the backyard. I used raise beds and wicking gardens, because I was keen on growing Western medicinal herbs and didn’t want the soil toxicity. My husband had grandparents in Varina, and I planted a garden in their yard.”

She describes her flower quest as “a slow hobby that became a rabbit hole I fell down.”

The same is true for Jenny Maloney. During the 2008 recession, she couldn’t find a job that utilized her art degree from VCU, so she went to work for her in-laws at their vegetable farm. She found her calling in blooms. “I sort of gravitated toward the flowers, probably because of my art degree,” she says. “I love the colors and textures. They are just beautiful. They speak to me.”

“Mom and Dad decided not to grow flowers anymore,” Paul Maloney says. “They weren’t making enough money and needed the ground for other things. Jenny didn’t want to do just vegetables. She was kind of a mess [without her flowers], so I said we could till the front yard.”

“Little by little, we filled up every little sunshiny spot,” Jenny Maloney says. “Then we cleared trees and got even more sunshiny spots. Paul’s brother said there were a couple of acres that they weren’t using at their house. We filled up their whole backyard and then their whole side yard, every inch of their property. Then we decided that was probably a little too much.”

For Barbee, the planning was more methodical. “We started in 2015. My husband is Bolivian, and we moved back to the U.S. from Bolivia. We both grew up on farms. We knew we wanted to farm, so we did a lot of research before purchasing property. We wanted to maintain and preserve farmland and grow sustainably. We don’t use chemicals on our farm. ... We want to protect the flora and fauna and create an environment that is positive for them. You are in this for the long-term, and that means being a steward of the land.”

Justine and Aaron McFarland of Tupelo Farm & Garden in Urbanna were organic farmers with Walker Farm in Vermont, which has operated since 1770, evolving into a horticultural destination for flower lovers. Justine managed eight of the farm’s more than 20 greenhouses before she and Aaron relocated to Richmond for a job and started their own farm in 2019. “We were astonished at the variety we could grow.”

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and “it was the perfect storm” for flower farming, Justine McFarland says. “Gardening gives people a chance to be outside, to dig in the dirt and reconnect with the earth’s beauty and bounty.” Suddenly gardening, particularly flower farming, became a huge hobby.

“I needed to do something that brought some joy and beauty into such an ugly, hate-filled world of COVID,” says Rachael Watman, who with her husband, Max, owns Swann’s End Flowers in Powhatan. “I started growing flowers until I had more flowers than I could fill my house with, so I put something on Facebook and started having people come to the end of the driveway to pick up little arrangements I made. Going into the second year, I decided I couldn’t do it at the end of the driveway. I’m far out here. So, I started doing weekly subscriptions.”

She garnered the interest of members of the Powhatan Chamber of Commerce, which led to an in-town pickup spot, introduction to local businesses who would carry her bouquets and connections with local farmers markets. While she still works her day job as the vice president of programs of The Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation, Watman finds creativity and community in the flower world.

In addition to launching flower farms large and small, the pandemic also laid bare the flaws with overseas flowers and the diversity of locally grown flowers. “When COVID happened, wholesale houses had to shut down, flowers weren’t getting shipped, and florists had a hard time sourcing flowers,” says Jenny Maloney. “My clients started sourcing more from us.”

“With the shipping and transit getting bad, the quality of the flowers that designers were getting was worse,” says Paul Maloney. “Now more customers are actually looking for local and that’s driving our growth.”

River City Flower Exchange is a testament to the burgeoning business of locally grown flowers. It was started in 2019 by Jenn Henry, a floral designer who runs Field Day Creativeand Amanda Montgomery, who started growing flowers in the front yard of her Bon Air home before expanding her Hummingbird Flower Co. to Beaverdam. From Montgomery’s living room to a shop in Scott’s Addition, the business has evolved into a grower-owned cooperative and Central Virginia’s first all-local flower market.

“In agriculture, you eventually end up bumping shoulders with other farmers. To succeed, collaboration and cooperation are much better than competition. Our goal is to lift up our local flower farming industry,” said McFarland, an original member and vice president of the exchange.

“On any given weekend, you can’t move in here,” said Claire Smith, manager of River City Flower Exchange, as she unloads buckets of flowers from one of the 11 flower farms that are part of the exchange. It’s her job to take in flowers on Mondays and Tuesdays, sort them by orders, and have them ready to be picked up by florists, event planners and floral designers Wednesday and Thursday mornings. The exchange is open to the public from noon to 2 p.m. on Wednesdays and Thursdays and from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays. They also offer workshops on floral and herb-related topics.

“The exchange has gone from being a pet project to now in its the second year at Scotts Addition,” said Hobson Carr, president of the exchange. “We got a grant from the USDA, a specialty crop grant that historically hasn’t been connected with flowers. That allowed us to build out our marketing material and fill out our workshops. We have doubled our sales, and we are 25 percent larger than last year.”

The grant also allowed the exchange to open a drop-off spot in Williamsburg, with aspirations to open more. The hope is to get more floral designers and retail outlets to give local flowers a chance.