Yukon-grown tulips and other local floral treasures
Rowan Brown is currently finishing her third season as a tulip farmer in the Yukon. Yes, you read that correctly: Brown grows local and sustainable tulips in northern Canada. What started out as just a dream, a few years ago, has since grown and blossomed into her very own business: The Boreal Florist.
It all began back in 2021 when many people were reassessing their career and life choices. Although Brown didn’t come from an agricultural family, never worked on a farm and had no formal farming or floristry training, what she did have was a very strong desire to dive into local, ecologically-minded flower farming and to have sustainability be at the heart of every business decision she made.
“Local flowers have a myriad of benefits,” Brown said. “A low carbon footprint, an improved vase life, they support our local pollinator populations and it’s completely safe to bury your face into our bouquets since we don’t use any pesticides, herbicides or chemical preservatives.” Like almost every industry in this era of globalization, the commercial flower industry has many negative externalities, including heavy use of toxic pesticides, carbon emissions associated with vast transportation lengths and extensive plastic use in packaging. Brown decided that she wanted to try to do things differently.
In December 2021, Brown received a funded scholarship for The Tulip Workshop, an online course that is specifically targeted at teaching flower farmers the ins and outs of forcing tulips. This laid the groundwork for what would eventually become The Boreal Florist. In terms of learning about running a flower business, she said that she’s mainly learned from the free expertise of florists and flower farmers on YouTube, online floristry and flower-farming courses, her little library of flower farming and sustainable florist books, as well as from several years of trial and error.
Growing up just outside of Whitehorse, in the Takhini River Valley, gave Brown a foundation of connection with the land as well as with the local community. One of the big reasons why she was willing to even try becoming a flower farmer, in a place where the average growing season is only about 70 days long, was knowing just how supportive Yukoners are of local small businesses. “I figured if Yukoners saw and understood the value of locally-raised meats, locally-grown produce, locally-roasted coffee and locally-brewed beer, they might just be able to see and understand the value of locally-grown flowers,” she said.
Luckily, she hasn’t been disappointed; and although jumping into all of this (as a complete newbie) has brought with it its challenges, the community support has been fantastic and very encouraging. “What keeps me going really is the excitement and delight of my wonderful customers. Seeing how much joy and beauty flowers can bring into people’s lives is really motivating to push through the difficulties of being a small business owner in this economy,” she said.
When Brown talks about her work you can clearly feel her enthusiasm and positivity. Her motto seems to be “You’ve got to work with what you have,” and that’s exactly what she’s so impressively done as The Boreal Florist. When she decided to try growing specialty tulips in the Yukon, necessity and some creative thinking inspired her to convert her crawl space into her very own growing space where she now grows tulips hydroponically under LED grow lights, utilizing only the ambient heat of her home above. Her basement is so well insulated that she needs no additional heat inputs.
From January to early May, Brown’s energy is focused on forcing successions of tulips under her home, while the world outside is frozen solid, and then getting them out to her customers via partnerships with a handful of local businesses.
“I’m eternally grateful for the wonderful business owners that have become my retail partners: Marlene from Behind The Barn, Larra from Cultured Fine Cheese, Michael from Landed Bakehouse, and Tom and Simone from TumTums Black Gilt Meats. I couldn’t be doing this without them!” she noted.
Now that her indoor tulip season has ended, she’s redirecting her attention to the flowers growing outside. Since the only land she owns is the tiny yard space at the back of her condo, she relies on the yards of family and friends to grow her summer crops. One day she hopes to have her own little slice of farmland where she can buildup a small-scale flower farm with lots of Yukon hardy perennials—but, for the time being, she’s once again working with what she has access to right now. The main focal flowers that she’s growing this season are lilies, sunflowers and dahlias, along with a whole smattering of other annuals like snapdragons, sweet peas, cosmos, zinnias, larkspur and some ornamental grasses, to name just a few.
This year marks Brown’s third summer, as a vendor at the Fireweed Community Market, selling local, seasonal and sustainable flowers. “I’m still in the process of figuring out what does and doesn’t work for me, with the infrastructure I have access to and our limited growing season,” she explained.
One thing is very clear, though: she’s holding firm to her dream of only offering Earth-friendly flowers grown in the North.
“I choose to work exclusively with Yukon-grown materials; any of my flowers you see for sale in shops around Whitehorse, or at the Fireweed Market, will always be one hundred percent Yukon grown. This means that unlike conventionally available flowers, which are being transported from Vancouver, at the closest, or more commonly South America [and] Europe, for many popular flower varieties, the flowers I sell are transported an average distance of twenty kilometres (the distance from my garden spaces to downtown Whitehorse).”
And it’s not just with her flowers that she’s attempting to cut down as much as possible on her business’s negative environmental impact.
“As a business offering physical goods, I am really conscientious of the end life of my products. I want my customers to be able to easily reuse, recycle and compost all the components of my products. This means using paper packaging rather than plastic, never using floral foam in my floristry work and not using pesticides or chemical preservatives on my flowers.”
Each year, Brown also does a handful of weddings. “I’m careful about how much I take on, just because I like to stick to my commitment of using one hundred percent Yukon-grown florals. The couples I often work with are doing small-scale weddings or elopements and want their florals to have a bit of a Yukon flavour to them. My designs are seasonal, by nature, and I often incorporate native Yukon materials so that the florals blend harmoniously with the scenery.”
At the end of 2023, Brown turned 28 years old, and her (slightly terrifying) birthday gift to herself was to leave behind the job she had worked at for seven years and to pursue The Boreal Florist full-time. Life as a small business owner isn’t easy, and growing flowers north of the 60th parallel can be a gamble, as well. For example, last fall Brown planted 3,000 tulip bulbs in outdoor beds, as an experiment, and she’s still waiting on signs of life.
While she doesn’t know yet if those bulbs survived the winter, what she is sure of is that she’s going to keep going, carried by her willingness to try, and to fail, and to keep at it until the successes outnumber the failures. And, who knows, if we’re lucky, those tulips planted outside last fall will emerge from the cool ground, soon, and be turned into some gorgeous bouquets for sale on an upcoming, sunny Thursday afternoon at the farmers’ market.More information and updates about The Boreal Florist can be found on Facebook and on Instagram, as well as at theborealflorist.square.site.
