Breaking Ground in Sustainable Floristry

On a cold afternoon in March, a sweet, earthy scent wafts through Molly Culver ’03’s industrial studio in south Brooklyn. Hyacinths of different varieties — with names like “Blue Jacket” and “Miss Saigon” — lay in heaps atop a long table that is covered with salvaged brown paper. Culver and two members of her team are preparing these flowers for her Seasonal Flower Project, a weekly or biweekly subscription-based service that provides locally grown flowers to customers across New York City.     

The project, now in its third year, is flourishing. But it wasn’t something that Culver had necessarily seen on the horizon for her first year as a full-time florist when she left her job as a farm educator in 2019. Culver launched her business, Molly Oliver Flowers, more than a decade ago, while working in organic farming. Over the years, Culver gained momentum, becoming widely known for her sustainable approach to floral design. Going into 2020, she was ready for a full year of weddings and other events, and then the pandemic hit. “I had 40 weddings on the calendar, maybe 45, and within like two weeks, they were all postponed,” Culver recalls.     

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As work fell away, she wasn’t sure what came next. “I was just agonizing seeing people going through lockdown,” she says. And then Culver started to think about the struggles that lay ahead for the farmers she works with. “I knew that all their greenhouses were full of baby plants,” she says. “They had made all these upfront investments with the expectation that they would be selling their product to florists.”     

And soon, a “lightbulb” went off, she says. In years past, Culver had contemplated trying out a flower subscription but didn’t have the bandwidth to get it up and running between her day job in farming and doing weddings. Now she had this “window to test it out,” she says. It was just a matter of connecting all the pieces. Culver modeled the Seasonal Flower Project after the CSAs (Community-Supported Agriculture) she had managed in previous jobs. “I’ve been kind of a CSA coordinator mentally for the better part of 15 years,” she says. “And I know how to do that.”

The main difference would be the product: Instead of people receiving an assortment of fresh produce from a farm, they would get bouquets of fresh, seasonal blooms. She put the word out through social media, and quickly the number of subscriptions climbed. By late April of that year, Culver was making contact-free, curbside deliveries. And it came right at the moment when people, especially New Yorkers, were in need of the particular kind of joy that flowers bring. “Just being able to give people that beauty directly at such a dark, hard, sad time was so meaningful and so uplifting,” she says. “People clearly were so cheered and helped by the presence of live flowers in their homes at that time, and it certainly was an enormous help with the farms.”     

With two years under her belt, Culver has grown the Seasonal Flower Project to about 125 subscriptions and expanded into 16 neighborhoods across the city, from Harlem to Long Island City. Along the way, there have been a few changes to improve overall efficiency, including some key hires, such as a farm liaison and drivers to transport the flowers. To accommodate the increased demand, Culver has partnered with local bookstores, wine shops, and other businesses who have offered their spaces as weekly pickup locations for subscribers, including The Bakery on Bergen, owned by Barnard alum Akim Vann ’90, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights. For Culver, the project has been a unique opportunity to build community and support local economies, much like she did throughout her career, working at the nexus of social justice and urban food systems. (She donates 15% of the profits from the Seasonal Flower Project to BIPOC farmers and organizations working on land-based reparations.)     

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There’s also been a learning curve when it comes to the nuts and bolts of planning the weekly subscriptions. Culver works with a network of 30 farmers within a 200-mile radius of New York City, and that requires a good deal of coordination, from keeping an organized calendar of farm deliveries to selecting the best varieties for members. “If the consumer is going to expect the flowers to last five to 10 days, it’s a different quality of flower and sometimes a totally different variety or species that’s appropriate for that,” Culver explains. “So I started working directly with farmers to share with them my wish list of crops, telling them what’s really working on our end and then seeing what really works for them.”  

Culver is now busier than ever, with weddings back in full swing. The celebrations that were previously postponed have been rescheduled, not to mention a slew of new clients she’s booked for the year ahead.         

“I definitely have felt the intensified level of inquiries coming in,” she says.     

Even with the frenzy of the wedding boom, she enjoys helping couples bring these special celebrations to life with the beauty of locally grown flowers, in a way that’s “the least wasteful as possible,” she says. “I want to offer people the opportunity to connect with local farmers in our region and get to experience the flowers that are actually in season at the time of their event.”            

Back in the studio, Culver and her team are focused on processing the remaining hyacinths for that day’s delivery. Every step is executed carefully and with sustainability in mind: Rubber bands are removed from the stems and saved in a glass jar; organic waste is placed in a bin and composted nearby; bouquets are slipped into 100% recycled paper sleeves. Culver and her studio assistant Sophie take a break to snap some shots of the soon-to-be-delivered blooms that will appear in a weekly newsletter for subscribers. Culver wants people to see the whole plant in the photo, including its bulbous roots. It is a fitting metaphor. Floral design has allowed Culver to share this vital, interconnected world of farming that’s so dear to her with others. But it isn’t only educational, she says, it’s also about “experiencing beauty in new ways.”

Read part three of this three-part article.