9 February 2026

Petalon at Flowers From The Farm

We made the long journey from Cornwall up to Nottingham for the Flowers From The Farm conference last week. For those who don’t know, Flowers From The Farm is a UK trade association promoting a financially and environmentally sustainable local cut flower industry and we were honoured to be asked to speak this year. We shared our story so far, from delivering bouquets around Hackney on a bicycle to where we are now, on a regenerative farm on the north coast of Cornwall.

When we first started growing here the information we found most useful was always the videos from other growers talking about the mistakes they’d made. These mini-catastrophes helped guide us into making slightly fewer mistakes than we might have over the last 5 years so in turn, we focused on the commercial miss-steps that Petalon has made over the years, in the hope that we might be able to provide similar assistance.

As a business we try to be as open and honest as possible about who we are, what we do and don’t grow and where everything comes from, so we figured that these flower farmers looking to grow their own businesses would appreciate the same level of honesty when it came to our business! Exploring our own trials and tribulations – from getting our Facebook ads account hacked, to broken flower fridges, to failed crops on to the various ways we tried to bankrupt ourselves over the years – was deeply therapeutic for us both. For our part, our main takeaway from the weekend was the incredible variety of growers we met from across the country, adapting their own practices and the flowers they grow to suit their own particular part of the world.

Growing flowers is such a locally dependent practice that doing what seems like the same thing a few hundred miles apart in the same country can manifest itself as something completely different. That variety and its beautiful consequences left our throats horse from chatting for two days straight and gave us notebooks full of ideas on how to drive Petalon onwards and upwards over the coming years. Big shout out to the speakers either side of us, Millie Proust of Alma Proust and their gorgeous seeds, and Josh Sparkes from Birch Farm in North Devon and their inspiring Japanese Natural Farming program where weeds are seen as an asset. We can dream.