About

HELLO!

I’m Fern Devine. I grow seasonal British flowers on our small farmhouse plot five miles from Stroud in Gloucestershire. We sell directly to our customers via this website, our farm gate, and the Vestry cafe in Uley. We also sell wholesale to florists.

 

OUR ETHOS

We are building a sustainable business that aligns and flourishes with nature. In short, we are:

Small. Everything starts small. But we intend to stay small. Small enough to give everything due care and attention.

Local and low impact. Many people want an easy way to enjoy flowers grown near them. We grow chiefly for a local market within a 5-10 mile radius and our customers appreciate the low mileage means a smaller carbon footprint

Biodiverse. We embrace and nurture biodiversity and benefit from it. We grow without pesticides and weedkillers.  We use ‘no dig’ methods for our flower beds to preserve soil structure. We also use recycled and biodegradable packing wherever possible, avoiding plastics.

Seasonal. We grow with the seasons which means fresh cut flowers are available from April to November. Seasonality is at the heart of what it means to grow and enjoy British cut flowers and our customers embrace this.

 

OUR STORY

The seed for this venture started with some sweet peas I cultivated with my mum when we all moved to Lapley Farmhouse (us from Bristol and her from Stroud) in the spring of 2016. The sweet peas were amazing that year and we've been growing them from the seeds ever since.

Before we moved to Lapley we had a small city garden (albeit with the last remaining apple tree from an old orchard at the end of it) and a part-share of an allotment. Moving here we were hugely excited to have closer and more extensive growing space, and we were amazed by the bountiful ease with which everything grew. We joked that the name ‘Lapley’ must mean ‘in the lap of the Gods’ for that's how it felt. And we continue to brim with gratitude for it.

During the 2020 Covid lockdown we started to extend our vegetable and flower patch to the end of the small field next to the house. By 2022 had created over 30 new beds, giving us an extra 150 m2 of growing space. We followed Charles Dowdling’s ‘No Dig’ method to maintain healthy soil structure and have committed to growing our flowers without the use of pesticides and herbicides. Read more about our ethos here.

Between 2020 and 2023 the focus was on growing and discovering what works. In 2024 we hope that more people will enjoy these flowers, grown seasonally and naturally, unique to the place they were grown and the hour they were cut.

Love and flowers,

Fern