You might not have seen Georgie Newbery – flower farmer, florist, teacher, mentor, writer and communicator par excellence – in the flesh but if you love growing cut flowers you’ve probably met her online on one of her many social media meeting places.
Since 2010, when she and her husband Fabrizio Bocca started Common Farm Flowers on a seven-acre smallholding in Somerset, she has been the welcoming face (framed with large red spectacles) of the endeavour.
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“When I decided to take the business online, Fabrizio agreed but on condition that I would never use his real name or the children’s names or show our farmhouse,” she explains. “I thought he was being over protective but actually it was a brilliant decision. It means all our social media work is about the business and my kids won’t sue me later.”
Although by the age of six she was earning pocket money weeding her mother’s garden, Georgie came late to gardening. In her twenties she lived in Paris working for Vogue and John Galliano before knocking out three novels set in the world of fashion. Things changed when she moved to Somerset.
Her first venture was not a success: she took a stall at a local farmers’ market selling flower posies, but soon discovered people prefer to add their own foliage to a bunch of cheaper flowers.
She created a website and started to offer bouquets by post. The business took off, and four years later she published The Flower Farmer’s Year. Along with providing and arranging the flowers for weddings, funerals and special events, she started to run workshops at the farm.
Word got round that here was a self-taught, down-to-earth grower, generous with her information and, with her large expressive hands and occasional sashays round the studio, a brilliant teacher.
During Covid, Georgie was asked by the Garden Media Guild to do a Facebook demo and found she really enjoyed it. With the help Nicola, her tech support, she took her courses and a succession of topical demos, from Growing Dahlias to Cutting and Conditioning Flowers, online.
If my customers and I both understand that I am growing in an environment, and that it does not matter if they and I have perfect flowers, then we win.
Using either her iPhone or a laptop, she found she didn’t need fancy equipment. “You can see yourself on your screen so you can spot if you’re out of shot, or your bra strap’s showing, or you’re gurning. And you can make sure your viewers can see the exact thing you’re talking about. That was transforming.”
Her own YouTube channel followed, and she now reaches 100,000 viewers worldwide on Instagram, Facebook, her website and, most recently, Substack, where her club members are treated to hot-off-
Small-scale flower farming has exploded as a way of making a living, she says. Where earlier market gardens often specialised in one or two kinds of flower, these new businesses rely on a wide variety of crops and have become much more sustainable: “Instinctively, none of us use pesticides or herbicides.” When it comes to challenging seasons or pest explosions, like this summer’s aphid invasion that made her foxgloves unsellable, she stays firmly organic.
I want as many people as possible to grow as many flowers as they would like
“If my customers and I both understand that I am growing in an environment, and that it does not matter if they and I have perfect flowers, then we win. It matters a lot, though, that the small birds and hoverflies have aphids to eat.”
She and Fabrizio started to renovate the farmhouse and its outbuildings in 2004. “We were full fantasists,” she says. “We had all the John Seymour [the self-sufficiency pioneer] books and were going to be market gardeners and keep pigs and grow veg.” They dug a tennis-court-sized veg garden and threaded flowers through it.
With bills mounting, Georgie realised they needed to earn ‘proper money’. When she received a bouquet by post from the Real Flower Company, she had a light-bulb moment: she would make cut flowers her business. “I found the growing part easy,” she says. “Also, the internet is amazing – if you don’t know how to do something, you just look it up.”
On the flower farm, small and sustainable continue to be beautiful for Georgie. Fabrizio manages the land, and has created wildflower meadows rich with orchids, several ponds and native hedges full of insects and birds.
A neighbour helps with weeding, but Georgie still does all the growing, propagating and cutting herself, though she has swapped smart society weddings for smaller, DIY ones, which she loves. She has also reduced the number of workshop days at the farm to ten a year, which frees her up to do more online courses and mentoring; a more lucrative use of her time.
“I want as many people as possible to grow as many flowers as they would like, and if they want to sell them, to be able to sell them. And if they want to arrange them themselves, I will show them, and if they want to run a small business, I will show them how to run it on their terms, so they don’t have to get onto a hamster wheel of ‘more for the sake of more’.”
How does she keep all the balls in the air? “I’m very organised,” she says. “I get up early, and I focus on one job at a time. I even strategise emptying the dishwasher.”
Find out more about Georgie Newbery at commonfarmflowers.com
