Winter Inspiration

Finding inspiration in the winter can be hard but planning for the next gardening season always seems to help. Last year our gardens officially reached our gate, so in 2025 we are focusing less on major additions to our flower collection and stead learning to go deeper in relationship with the plants that we already have. Unfortunately, this also means letting go of the ones that have struggled. The same goes with our business. Leaning into the things we love that feel right, and letting go of the things that struggle and aren’t aligned with our values. Reflecting on the last seven years of creating this farm, what feels right is helping gardeners become more confident, using the garden as a place to foster creativity and authentic living, and growing flowers that make daily life more beautiful and celebrations more personal.

With that said, we will always be refining. Pulling things out and replacing them with better varieties. Tucking bulbs or a new iris into an empty space, or figuring out how to bottle up the smell of garden roses and make a salve for summer gardening hands. Here are some plants that we are expanding on or adding in our gardens, new ways to use flowers for skincare, as well as a list of things we are letting go.

Floral Design

Roses - The first one is a unique rose called Stephen Rulo that looks like Koko Loco but is suppose to have a better growth habit and is more productive. This vintage mauve color is the most requested from our wedding clients. I purchased a dozen from Grace Rose Farm two years ago. Hopefully, they will arrive this season. A question I get often is where we buy roses. The biggest and healthiest roses I've noticed have come from Weeks Roses, but their varieties are limited. I always get Grade B bareroots for the most mature plants.  If pest are an issue for you, make sure you include beneficial nematodes in your pest management strategy this spring.  If you don't have a pest management strategy, what are you waiting for?

Flowering Tobacco (Nicotiana) - This year the Flowering Tobacco we planted along the walkway outside the barn made me happy every single time I walked by. The beauty of having fresh flowers is powerful, then when you combine it with smelling flowers your brain gets a turbo boost of happiness because your olfactory sense (sense of smell) is one synapse away from your amygdala which is the part of your brain that regulates emotions. So....make sure you tuck some fragrant blooms into your garden. Flowering Tobacco also comes in a burgundy color which we are trying this year.

Woodies - Every extra dollar we have is going to purchase more shrubs. Last fall we planted 15 flowering almond, 15 snowball bush, 20 hydrangeas, 10 quince, 10 forsythia, 10 cranberry viburnum, 20 lilacs, and replaced some Baptista.  We will also be working to add more echinacea into the perennial section, and maybe astrantia if we can find seeds. These plants will help us have flowers and foliage from early spring to fall so our spring bouquets can be more lush earlier in the year. Never underestimate the value of these plants. They offer color in the spring in your landscape, and people crave spring flowers the most. I bought most of these from local nurseries like Longmont Tree Farm, Green Spot, or Little Valley Wholesale. The hydrangea above is called QuickFire. I love its muted colors and style of bloom.

Dahlias - This year we are hoping to get a few varieties that we lost last year or haven’t been able to get our hands on since we started. On the list is Brown Sugar, Polka, Kickoff, Arabian Night, and Copper Boy (pictured). We are also planning to sell our tubers this year so mark your calendars for a March Dahlia Sale from us. If you are new to dahlias, mark your calendar for April 18 from 1-3 for our spring garden party. This year it’s called Dive Into Dahlias. Come out and talk dahlias with us. We’ll share what we look for in a good tuber, where and how to plant them, and what we’ve learned about growing them in our climate.

Skincare

Bottling up the smell of aromatic flowers, like garden roses and lavender, for your skin and psyche has brought an abundance of inspiration this winter. Here are some new plants we’ll be adding solely for this purpose.

Lavender & Helichrysum - we are replacing a few rows of lavender that seem to have a disease. I'm replacing them with better oil producing varieties as I see more opportunity with lavender skincare products than I do with fresh bundles. We will be testing out Angustifolia x Maillette, Angustifolia x Purple Bouquet, and Intermedia x Fat Spike Grosso, as well as Helichrysum which grows similarly. All purchased from a breeder in Palisade called Sage Creations. This June I am going to an Aromatherapy Retreat in France during their lavender season to learn more about distillation and medicine making. This is what I am most excited about for my own personal growth. On my farm wish list is a commercial sized distiller.

Supporting Medicinal Flowers - We fall planted an entire row of chamomile in September, and are planting calendula, Melissa, and comfrey. One of my goals is to utilize all the flowers to their fullest potential. Deadheading roses and drying them to infused into body oil is one example. Let nothing be wasted is my motto.  A great medicinal herb farm to check out is Zack Woods Herb Farm and an aromatherapist to follow on IG is Science of Essentials.

Iris - We are not planting new iris because we planted 100 new plants last year so now we are just waiting for them to establish. This spring will be year 2 for these new varities so I hope to get a lot more blooms.  A few that I'm really excited about our Champagne & Strawberries (pictured), Coffee Trader, Downtown Brown, Entitled, and Haunted Heart.  Purchased online from Schreiners Garden for an August plant date. I am on the hunt for some dwarf varieties to tuck into the landscape for cutting. 

Allium - I was hesitant to plant allium because at our old rental house we had some small allium take over a section of the garden and it all smelled like onions. But giant ones make a statement in early spring when the rest of the garden is still sleeping and they are so big and easy to cut that its easy to stay on top of them so they don't go to seed unless you want them too. I find they fill the gap between winter and spring really well and I can easily sell them to florist if I have too many. This fall we planted 100 giant white ones and 100 schubertii in the orchard in front of the arborvitae (see below...they look like little white baseballs on the ground). I still have more lavender ones to get into the ground but I need to find a spot for them....maybe behind the greenhouse?

Indigo - This year we received a gift of indigo seeds from SASHA DUERR, the guest teacher out of Hawaii who taught our Botanical Dye Retreat.  I'm super excited to plant these and be able to have that blue velvet ribbon you see below for our Winter Wreath Workshops. 

Woodland Garden - And lastly, in the "secret garden" of my backyard, I'm working on a woodland garden because the barn cast a lot of shade in one section. To do this I planted a lot of Spanish bluebells, astilbe, hyacinths, hellebore,  heucherrella, and ferns within the already established sweet woodruff.  This picture from the Denver Botanics is my inspiration. 

Letting go

It’s hard to let go of some of our favorite things but when they are expensive, or take more water or infastructure than we are able to provide then we make the hard call. Here is what we are saying goodbye to.

Annual Vines - Particularly Sweet Peas, Love in a Puff, and Hyacinth. Sweet Peas don’t grow long enough stems for us, and the others are hard to trellis and hard to harvest. We’ve replaced them with perennial clematis, honeysuckle, and climbing roses so we can still offer the trailing vines in our designs with less hassle.

Delphinium - This is a hard one. On years when we get a lot of rain they are glorious but with the climate changing and weather warming, delphinium struggle.

Frittalaria Persica - These were beautiful one wet spring, but with bulbs costing $5/bulb wholesale, they are too big of a risk to take since they haven’t perennialized. Buying them annually would mean selling them for $15/stem wholesale.

Ranunculus - We said goodbye a few years ago but the dream still persisted. Maybe we'd build a hoop house one day? But then there were loads of them coming to the Collective from bigger farms with the right infastructure which allows us to still get our fix when we need them.

Large Scale Weddings - Weddings that require hanging flowers from the ceiling and bringing in tons of imported flowers to complete designs for a 4 hour event, works completely against the grain of our values so we are letting them go too. They can be fun and financially tempting but hard to swallow. We would much rather design with seasonal flowers from our gardens for small to mid sized weddings, special occasions, and everyday beauty.

I hope this gave you some food for thought as you dive into planning your garden this year. My biggest takeaway is to focus on what you love but only if it loves to grow in your garden.

Here’s to a year of refining and aligning,

Gina