When The Flowers Sang: The Moment Everything Changed
What happens when we slow down, listen to nature, and let things unfold?
As a flower farmer, I planted hundreds—thousands—of tulip bulbs every autumn. They spent the winter hibernating, dreaming spring into being. By January, they’d begin to emerge, and by late March, the earliest varieties would be almost ready.
No, not ready to bloom—but to be pulled up, placed upright in bins, and put into cold storage in the barn. Some were rolled in paper and tucked into the flower cooler, usually waiting for Mother’s Day. This was simply the norm in commercial growing.
But over time, something shifted.
I was an accidental flower farmer. I had simply planted an abundance of flowers for the bees. But flowers, by their nature, invite abundance. The more I cut them, the more they bloomed. Each year I grew more and more flowers. Soon, I had more flowers than I knew what to do with. People started asking if I delivered arrangements, and before I knew it, I was teaching myself how to be an eco florist delivering messages of the importance of supporting locally grown flowers and pollinators.
My background as an artist helped me intuitively work with colors and textures, but flowers have their own personalities, their own ways of moving, opening, and aging. I had to learn their language—how to handle each stem, which ones preferred to be arranged freshly cut, and which needed time to open before they could take their place in a bouquet.
And yet, after a few years as a small-scale commercial grower, I began to feel uneasy about what I was doing. This was deeply personal—no judgment toward others—but I couldn’t ignore it.
By then, I was harvesting hundreds of stems at a time, two or three times a week. Bucket after bucket, armloads of flowers. I moved quickly, efficiently. But something wasn’t right.
Even the simple act of gathering my harvesting buckets and clippers made me feel unwell. I found myself putting on an energetic shield, as if I needed armor just to do my work. But I was too busy keeping up with the farm to allow myself to explore why.
And then—everything changed.
One day, my husband gave me a magical device that converts the bio-energy of flowers into music. The first time I heard the voice of a hellebore, I burst into tears.
As an environmental artist, I work intuitively with site energies and the unseen world, and in that moment, I finally understood.
I was feeling the energy of the plants as I harvested them.
For the first time, I allowed the tulips to just be tulips. To bloom in all their splendor. And I realized—I had never actually seen all the tulips I’d planted bloom.
Some were fragrant, some looked like peonies, others wildly exuberant in form and color. And I had never known that bees absolutely adore tulips!
I believe that when we slow down and truly observe and listen to nature and our intuition, we are changed.
Here’s a special moment from those tulips: a bee harvesting pollen, moving from flower to flower, searching for the one with the electrical impulse that tells him it hasn’t yet been visited. View the reel on Instagram @AlchemyFarmStudio
Nature truly is amazing, isn’t it? 🌿🐝
