A Little Cheesin’ in the Grocery Aisle

At the farmers market, we know immediately if we got it right.

Someone stops. They go quiet for half a second. They pick up a bunch and don’t put it back down. Sometimes they ask what the crazy brain-looking flower is called, or they marvel at the smell of some lemon basil, and we talk for a few minutes and by the end they’re a flower person and they didn’t even know it when they walked up. We get to see it happen in real time. That feedback loop is one of our absolute favorite things about this job.

Grocery is another thing entirely.

We make the bouquets, load them in the van, and put them in a cooler at grocery locations across DFW. And then we leave.

We don’t see who picks them up. We don’t know if the iris made someone stop on their way to the cheese aisle, or if the parrot tulips confused someone in the best possible way, or if a bouquet ended up on a kitchen table somewhere and made the whole room feel different. We just make them as well as we know how and trust that it’s enough.

It’s a little vulnerable, honestly. The work that goes into these flowers, months before we ever cut them, is something we carry with us. We long for the moment someone smiles and excitedly shows their family what they found. We want to hear about the bouquet that ended up on a mantle to honor someone loved and lost. We just usually don’t get to.

Every once in a while, though, word gets back to us. A store manager will mention that our bouquets took his breath away when they hit the cooler that morning, that the colors were, in his words, “so good.” Someone will send a photo.

Moments like that are the farmers market feeling, just delivered secondhand. And it’s more than enough.

We do farmers markets because we love them. We do grocery because we love the idea of locally grown flowers being accessible to anyone who strolls through a local store. They each have their rewards, and on days like that, we’re cheesin’ with pride over both.

No matter where you grab our flowers, the farmers market, the grocery store, the farm stand, through flower club, they include little pieces of our hearts and we are just so lucky to get to share them.