Three profiles of influential NYC florists
The May 2020 issue of Slow Flowers Journal is our 34th consecutive special section for Florists’ Review, our magazine partner.
We love featuring the Slow Flowers’ message and our members’ stories each month, with original, informative and visually compelling content to inspire you.
Showcasing the positive business models and strategies to promote local, seasonal and sustainable flowers is one beautiful way to support the community and our members.
Inside the May issue pages, you’ll find three feature articles, including Slow Flowers member Taylor Patterson of Fox Fodder Farm, a Brooklyn florist. We also profile two noteworthy NYC floral professionals who value growing and sourcing domestic flowers. We love sharing these feature stories about our Slow Flowers community and other emerging and important topics. Enjoy!
Floral Immersion
Fox Fodder Farm’s new Brooklyn retail and workshop space connects New Yorkers with nature in a new way
Taylor Patterson is a New York-based floral entrepreneur whose aesthetic is lush, elegant and seasonally-inspired. Patterson developed Fox Fodder Farm over the past nine years, evolving it from a Brooklyn Flea stall where she sold plants in Mason jars into a studio and shop that serves weekly business accounts (restaurants, coffee shops and retailers), offers local floral deliveries and designs for weddings and special events.
After two years operating from a small kiosk in SOHO’s Canal Street Market, Patterson in February relocated Fox Fodder Farm to an 1,800-square-foot design studio and storefront in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. She co-designed the sunbathed space with landscape architect Brook Klausing of Brook Landscape. “We spoke the same language in terms of how I wanted it to feel and what materials we used — stone, reclaimed wood, concrete,” Patterson says. “I want people to enter the environment we’ve created here and just relax.”
The shop feels like an outdoor courtyard garden with an in-ground stone water feature. Cut flowers line the textured walls and organic shelving displays products by artists and artisans known to Fox Fodder Farm.
Click to download and read FLORAL IMMERSION
Servant of Flowers
Emily Thompson’s eponymous floral enterprise pays homage to nature’s seductive ways
Emily Thompson is an iconoclast, an anything-but-predictable designer and artist, and owner of the NYC studio and shop that bears her name, Emily Thompson Flowers.
She describes her aesthetic as “sometimes very off-putting for the unsuspecting . . . I prefer flowers that are difficult and materials that are thorny and a bit repulsive.” If you follow Emily Thompson Flowers on social media, you’ll recognize this sentiment in her choice of hash tags: #madebywildanimals, #servantofflowers and #butcherofflowers, among others.
After several years operating both production studio and retail shop from a 19th century building in lower Manhattan’s Seaport District, two years ago she settled the consumer-facing side of Emily Thompson Flowers into a “very beautiful little jewel box” within an elegant SOHO environment which also houses La Mercerie Café and Roman and Williams Guild, an interiors and home furnishings gallery. “It’s meant to be a very collaborative mixed-use space,” Thompson explains. “We see it as a way that people, especially in New York, who are out of touch with anything in the natural world, come into closer contact with it. We’re there to make contact, physical, face-to-face contact, and to create an experience for people where they engage with our materials.”
Click to download and read SERVANT OF FLOWERS
On the Farm with David Beahm
A top NYC event and destination wedding producer draws his inspiration from an historic Pennsylvania farm
On weekends when he doesn’t have an event, party maestro David Beahm escapes to Thistle Dew Farm, his rural getaway located 90 minutes outside Manhattan in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County. There, he trades his dapper bow tie and tailored vest for a plaid shirt or the hooded sweatshirt from his alma mater Elon University and heads outdoors to tour his growing fields or walk to the stream with his dog ‘Jim Beahm.’
To Beahm, event designer and founder of David Beahm Experiences, time spent here is essential for his wellbeing and creativity. And as flower farming and the origin of flowers gain attention in the wedding and event profession, Beahm embraces the farm as an essential part of his company’s brand and mission. “I find solace in digging in the dirt,” he maintains. The sensory joy Beahm gains from leaving the city behind for even 48 hours reminds him of summers at his grandparents’ traditional victory garden in Virginia. “This farm saved me after 25 years in New York City,” he confides.
“This is where I come to think. And this is where design happens. It doesn’t always happen sitting in my desk in Manhattan. It happens here when I’m digging in the dirt.”
Click to download and read ON THE FARM WITH DAVID BEAHM
