Our garden is a magical space, full of ever changing beauty and bounty. Each spring it explodes with life after months of being frozen, a palette of hundreds of varieties of flora all intertwined, harvests peaking and fading through the season, guiding our designs and cuisine. It’s our dream and our hope to grow this joy and share it with you.

Our garden is ever evolving - each season beginning with it a new mission full of exciting varietals to plant… bringing in new tactics, challenges, and lessons along the way. We grow in northern New York with freezing winters, wet and windy springs, and the dreamiest of summers. We come from the south and have always had a small garden of easy herbs, vegetables, and flowers to cook with and share with family and friends. This garden grew out of that love of growing, wanting to share it with our girls, and the desire to create something special, something epic - to share.

The original idea was twice the size of the garden today, thank goodness we scaled it back - there is no way we could have managed a space that size, we have barely managed the garden as it is, some years better, some worse. We began with mostly annual flowers to grow and arrange in little mason bouquets and larger wrapped ones adorning our chicken coop daily for anyone who needed a little pick-me-up. Then we thought, what if we celebrated the full moon each month with a lovely dinner in the garden surrounded by everything harvested from around you?! That was epic, that grew the joy… we need to start that up again! Next we got a few requests for weddings and that has been such a happy addition to all of the Persephone endeavors - to be a part of such joyous, monumental day with our locally gown romantic arrangements is an honor and so much fun!

Moving forward… this past fall we tilled the garden for the second time due to copious large rocks and invasive quackgrass - and therefore have mostly, a clean slate. Our new design is a hybrid of our former cut flower garden and a touch of a formal potager with inspiration from Monticello, Great Maytham Hall, Malmaison, and the Tuileries. We are growing many more vegetables this year - focusing on a few specialty items such as zucchini blossoms, speckled lettuces, and pink radicchio. We are shifting our flower selection to varietals that are harder to find in our area - fragrant lavender, delphiniums in all the blues, ruffly hollyhocks, rosey lisianthus, an array of dahlias, rare black-eyed-susans, buff sunflowers and more. Lastly we are adding more perennials for structure and intriguing produce such as hardy kiwis and hazelberts.

We hope to grow our flock this year, getting more chickens and relocating them to help out with the compost as well as raising ducklings in the garden to keep the slugs and snails at bay. With this in mind, we will need to rethink our Flowerstand - which is an opportunity for improvement (keeping our bouquets out of the sun, wind and rain) to ensure the best quality bouquets around.

Stay tuned, we hope to have tons of fun events this season: You Pick Parties, Garden Cafe, Full Moon Bouquet Bars, Back to School Garden Camp, Meditation Among the Flowers, and more.

Thank you more than ever for all of your amazing ideas and support, you can contact us at persephoneflowersny@gmail.com if you have a suggestion or want to collaborate on any fun new ideas.

Let’s grow the joy together! - Syrah