The Farmer’s Florist | #ConsiderTheLocalFlwrs & Utlizing Neighbor Businesses to Make a Bigger Impact

Friday, August 28, 2015 | As a florist, Christie Craig of The Farmer’s Florist uses what’s local and seasonal from Nashville/Middle Tennessee flower farmers and often gathers materials herself from the surrounding landscape on her own farm. In the “off-season” she takes to foraging. Her work as a stylist is botanically- and seasonally-focused, taking cues from nature to bring together the already abundant beauty seasonal flowers have to offer. Christie has worked with Flower Girl NYC, Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Village of Flowers Nashville, Billy Reid New York, Consider The Wldflwrs, and her own pop-up shops. She can create a landscape of flowers to accompany your upcoming wedding, dinner party, interior photoshoot, and fashion editorials.

#ConsiderTheLocalFlwrs + Utlizing Neighbor Businesses to Make a Bigger Impact
by Christie Craig of The Farmer’s Florist

I love flowers. But my passion is supporting my farming community here in Nashville, Tennessee. My business, The Farmer’s Florist, wouldn’t exist without these farmers, as my main ethic as a business is to change the way we consider agriculture in our growing city. Being a low capital start-up (if we’re being transparent here) can present some challenges when it comes to promoting/adverstising your business and the farmers that support it, which is where the idea bloomed for the hashtag #ConsiderTheLocalFlwrs.

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#ConsiderTheLocalFlwrs was created as a collaboration with Nashville’s local jewelry artist and style blogger Consider The WldFlwrs, highlighting bouquets arranged by The Farmer’s Florist, harvested from a particular local flower farm. Emily of CTWF joins me on a local farm tour, snapping photos as we sweat, harvest, process, and arrange on the farm in exchange for the freshly harvested arrangement. These tours get plugged into social media, with a main focus on instagram leading consumers to Emily’s blog, explaining a bit about our week’s local farm. This relationship works beautifully, for who doesn’t love receiving flowers? It’s a way to open up these spaces, farms, farmers to an audience we might not normally reach—putting the art of flowers and farming in the same category as a handcrafted piece of beautiful jewelry.

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Our first #ConsiderTheLocalFlwrs featured an arrangement harvested from Humble Flowers—a small, women-owned-and-operated flower farm located in my community of Bells Bend. Bells Bend is located just 15 minutes from downtown Nashville, the last agriculturally utilized land in Metropolitan Nashville. Tyler, Katie, and Carrie are the strong, hard-working women behind Humble Flowers and uphold their stewardship for the land through sustainable and organic practices. The beauty of Humble Flowers lies in their name, as they are truly humble and authentic in their farming practices, utilizing the small plots of land they rent to grow an abundance of beauty. The passion in which these women care and tend, from seedlings to towering blooms inspires me to put the same care and spirit into the bouquets I arrange.

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