Get to know your flower farmers

 Hello! We’re Dana and Charles
(and that’s Arthur!)

Here’s the quick of it: We’re addicted to flowers. 

When we were kids back in Michigan, we used to wander through our grandmothers’ gardens smelling the flowers and picking the best blooms for our moms. Now that we have our own kids, there’s nothing we love more than being in the garden with them…and, if we’re being completely honest, we’re usually all barefoot!

Growing and bringing beautiful, fresh-cut flowers into our home each spring and summer is something we look forward to all year long.

They’re a super important part of the life we’re trying to create for ourselves and our children — one immersed in things that are true, good, and beautiful, because, let’s face it, our world can often be pretty harsh, detached, and even ugly.

Growing flowers allows us to slow down while we anticipate the garden as it grows, while we care for it and protect it from the weeds, and finally, enjoy it when it's time to savor its beauty!

Below, we each have a bit more to share with you about who we are, what’s important to us, and, frankly, “how we got this way.” 

We can’t wait to get to know you, too!

Charles

I’ve been in love with the natural world since I was a kid! My grandparents would often take my sister and me to visit the southeast Michigan Metroparks. We'd explore the nature centers and walk the trails through the park. Sometimes, my grandma would take us to feed the birds from our hands. My favorite, though, was when they’d take us to the Farm Center at Kensington Park in Milford, Michigan, to see the chickens, sheep, and other farm animals.

I’ve only ever told Dana this before now, but when I was an undergrad at Michigan State I seriously considered studying viticulture. But I didn’t think the Army would value an officer who could make Merlot for the troops, and I wanted to serve.

So, because I was deeply interested in how people value their choices, I decided to study economics. Still… you'd be more likely to find me reading on the lawn of the botanical garden than in the library.

Dana and I met the summer before my senior year at MSU, and I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. We were married two years later in an English garden in East Lansing.

By then I was serving in the Army as an engineer officer and a paratrooper. So, we moved to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and planted our first vegetable garden together. I’ll never forget the day, a couple of years later, when our two-year-old son, Chas, proudly brought a tennis ball-sized watermelon in from the garden for us to eat. It’s something I look back on whenever my enthusiasm outpaces my patience!

After a few years and a tour in Iraq, the Army moved us to Missouri. Though we were only there for a year, living in Missouri re-awoke something in me that had fallen asleep. We hiked trails and explored the ruins of Ha Ha Tonka Castle near the Lake of the Ozarks. We climbed the Elephant Rocks and swam in the Johnsons Shut-Ins. We spelunked in caves near Sullivan and fished trout from the Big Piney River near our home on Fort Leonard Wood almost every day with our kids. In short, our brief time living in Missouri made us open to take a great leap into the unknown and move to Anchorage, Alaska.

When people learn we’ve lived in Alaska, a lot of them ask what it was like to live in the Last Frontier. Nothing prepares you for its bigness or its wildness! Seeing a moose or black bear in the yard was common, but it never felt common. And watching thousands of sockeye salmon run up the Russian River for the first time was life-changing! Professionally, I still got to jump out of airplanes and helicopters for the Army. Only now I was doing it in high mountain valleys with snowshoes packed in my rucksack. We almost didn’t leave. I think this happens to a lot of people who come to Alaska. But the Army offered me the chance to join the faculty at West Point, and I always kind of wanted to be a teacher…

Dana

From the time I was very young, I knew I wanted to save the world. No one was surprised when I decide to major in sociology at Central Michigan University and studied issues affecting the Ojibwe Tribe in mid-Michigan. But after college I surprised everyone, Charles included, when I decided that if I really wanted to save the world, I needed to start in my own home. I chose to use my education and my passion for people to educate our own children. Charles’ career in the military afforded us a unique home-education backdrop: we embraced opportunities to explore the culture and natural landscape of each new place the Army sent us. But more than anything, we loved learning about each place’s native plant and animal species. And, while each of the places we lived taught us something important, none rivaled Alaska.

It was in Alaska that we really grew confident in our ability to cast our net into the deep for a catch. Like literally. We fished Alaska's rivers for salmon and set out from the Homer Spit to fish her open ocean for halibut. Charles and our oldest daughter spent a week rafting Alaska's wild interior with her scout troop. We dug razor clams at low tide on the shores of the Cook Inlet and landed in a plane near Don Sheldon's Denali chalet on the Ruth Glacier. We explored the Kenai Fjords, Prince William Sound, and Kachemak Bay. We saw pods of orcas, beluga whales, humpbacks, rafts of stellar seals, puffins, sea stars, jellies, lynx, caribou, grizzly bears, black bears, Dall sheep, and more. A few of us have even kissed a moose! And we hiked. And we canoed. And we hiked. We were learning to cast our nets into the deep, figuratively, as well.

No one in our immediate family had ever lived on a farm. Charles and I both grew up in the suburbs. But we always dreamed of recovering the good things that were lost when our family left their farms for good-paying factory jobs during the Depression.

We often talked about a cabin in the woods of Maine, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Montana, or Alaska in some far-off time when Charles retired from the Army. But somehow, that voice that asks, "If not now, when?" became more urgent as we prepared to leave Alaska for New York's Finger Lakes.

With only two years to explore the possibilities of life on a farm and recapture some of our lost heritage, we quickly got to work. We planted flowers and fruit trees. We raised turkeys, chickens, and geese. Everything we tried during those years had a learning curve, but one we discovered was in no way insurmountable. Time passed quickly, and it seemed like hardly a day went by where someone didn’t say, “This is the happiest I’ve ever been.” But soon, it was time to move again. And for the first time, I worried that the thing ahead wouldn’t be as beautiful as the life we were leaving behind.

Of course, I soon found I had nothing to fear. The Army community is small. We quickly reunited with old friends from past assignments. They and the new friendships we forged reminded me that the richness of life is what you make of it, wherever you are.

We dug into the culture and history of the Hudson Valley with the same enthusiasm we had for every place the Army had taken us before. We hiked its trails, learned about the ecology of the river, explored the city, and even left our own mark on the 200-year-old Army post at West Point: there is a Tricolor Beech tree on the point overlooking the river toward its far-off source in the Adirondacks that Charles and a couple of our kids planted with his cadets on Arbor Day one year.

But in the end, I suppose it was something like the instinct that causes Alaskan salmon to return home that led us to say, “Yes!” when the Army offered us the opportunity to come home and reconnect our lives to the source.

We can’t wait to share the things we learn on our farm, and of course, our beautiful blooms with you!

Meet our “staff.”
The secret ingredients of our beautiful blooms.