01 / How it started
Two dahlia tubers and a bad idea.
I quit a design job in the fall of 2018 with two dahlia tubers, a stack of library books, and no real plan. The first season was a disaster. The second one was slightly less of a disaster. By 2021 I was cutting enough for a Saturday market stall on North Mississippi, and by 2022 I stopped doing the market and started delivering.
Bloom and Stem is a quarter acre in NE Portland, plus a leased half acre out toward Sauvie for the varieties that need more room than the yard has. I do everything from seed order to delivery except the printing of tags, which my neighbor Sam does on a letterpress in his garage in exchange for standing subscription.
The name is literal. It's what goes into your vase, a bloom and its stem, cut the same week, arranged by hand. Nothing more clever than that.
02 / How we grow
No wire. No dye. No floral foam.
We grow certified organic on the home plot and no-spray on the leased ground. We reuse buckets until they crack, wrap in kraft paper, tie with cotton twine, and compost the trimmings on-site. Floral foam is banned in the studio, it's a single-use microplastic and there is a perfectly good pin frog invented in 1910 that does the same job better.
We do not sell imported roses. We do not sell any variety that has to travel more than a hundred miles to reach you. If a bride asks for a February wedding with peonies, we tell her, gently, to move the wedding to June or find a different florist.