Sweet peas can be tricky. Laura Beth Resnick ’11, who owns Butterbee Farm, just outside Baltimore, knows well the challenges of caring for these delicate flowers, especially in Maryland’s fickle climate, where temperatures can heat up quickly in the warmer seasons. These climbing annuals, bearing fragrant winged blossoms, prefer “a long cool spring,” she explains. But thanks to the two greenhouses on her flower farm, Resnick has been able to add sweet peas to the 100-plus varieties of flowers and foliage plants that she grows on the 5-acre property with her husband, Jascha Owens.
“They grow on a big wall, climbing up a trellis, and they smell amazing,” says Resnick. “It’s just a huge pleasure to start growing sweet peas in the greenhouses because that wasn’t something I was ever able to do until we had that infrastructure.”
Investments like these have paid off, and 10 years after starting the farm, Resnick is seeing the fruits of her labor. She’s purchased new equipment, implemented sustainable farming practices, and hired a small team of farmers, which in turn has enabled her to become a go-to, year-round producer of fresh, seasonal flowers for local florists and couples planning DIY weddings. Butterbee Farm — named after a butterfly in a bedtime tale made up by Resnick’s father — is just as bucolic as it sounds. Resnick and Owens currently lease the land from Alto Dale Farm, where they also live and work as groundskeepers for their landlords. While it is only a 15-minute drive from the center of Baltimore, the farm feels far from the city, with its rolling fields of dahlias, foxglove, lavender, eucalyptus, and more. There are also beehives and a vegetable garden, not to mention the couple’s resident farm dog, Dell.
The path to farming, however, was anything but linear for Resnick. Farming — let alone flower farming — wasn’t on her radar when she got to Barnard. Resnick transferred midyear from the New England Conservatory of Music, where she was pursuing flute studies, and arrived in New York City “feeling pretty lost,” she says. But meeting her roommate, Aviva Shen, a fellow midyear transfer student, changed all that. “Barnard actually kind of [played] a big part in my journey to farming but really because of this one chance meeting,” she says.
Shen had worked on a small, family-run farm in New Hampshire, and after hearing about the experience, Resnick decided to volunteer there the following summer and quickly “fell in love with it,” she says. After graduating from Barnard with a degree in East Asian religion, she interned at two other organic vegetable farms, in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. In 2013, Resnick moved back to her hometown of Baltimore to start her own vegetable farm, and then came another “chance encounter,” she says, when she connected with Ellen Frost, the owner of Local Color Flowers, a floral design business committed to sustainability.
Frost was doing the flower arrangements for Resnick’s sister’s wedding. Because her sister lived out of state, Resnick met up with Frost for a consultation, and it was during this conversation that she learned about some of the issues the flower industry was facing. Frost, who sources all her flowers within 100 miles, told Resnick that her growers “were starting to age.”
“She was worried that there weren’t enough young flower growers in the area for her to buy from,” Resnick says. “Her business is 100% local.” For florists like Frost, who are dedicated to reducing their carbon footprint, this was a troubling trend. By the end of the consultation, Resnick had already hatched a new plan: She would pivot from vegetables to cut flowers with a promise from Frost to buy as much of Butterbee Farm’s harvest as possible. “Ten years later, she’s still our biggest customer,” says Resnick.
Since then, Resnick has amassed a loyal customer base in the Maryland and Washington, D.C., area. “Our business is kind of growing exponentially every year,” she says. Florists have always comprised a large portion of Butterbee Farm’s clientele, and while these relationships have been critical to the business’s success, Resnick realized early on that they needed to branch out and started offering bulk flowers to couples doing DIY weddings. “Having all of our eggs in the one sort of designer florist basket felt a little bit risky,” she says.
In addition to supplying weddings and florists, Butterbee has a plant shop and offers guided farm tours, classes, and workshops. During the pandemic, Resnick moved most of these activities to online but is looking forward to having visitors back to the farm this spring. “We always have a lot of interest from the public in coming to the farm and seeing what we’re about and being involved,” she says. “And I love that.”
All along the way, Resnick has been a diligent steward of the land. She’s prioritized regenerative farming practices, such as employing no-till methods to preserve the ground’s natural biodiversity. “We’re doing a much more hands-on, much more labor-intensive approach, using hoes, for example, or shovels, which gently work the soil.” And she is invested in passing along this knowledge and experience to other growers — she serves as the secretary on the board of the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers and is involved in Future Harvest’s Beginning Farmer Training Program.
As a new season begins, Resnick and Owens are also preparing for the next big chapter: They just closed on their own property. The couple will be moving Butterbee Farm to its new home on 15 acres of land in White Hall, Maryland — about 45 minutes north of Baltimore — after the full growing season comes to a close. They hope to be up and running there by early 2023. “One of the nice things about having this tweaking period in our farm, where the first 10 years we were on leased land, is that we are able to learn what works and what doesn’t,” she says.
Resnick has big goals for the new farm, and if the past is any indicator of the future, she’ll certainly make these happen. “It was lucky, lucky chance, all the way along, you know?” she says. “And being open to all the opportunities.”
Read part two, “Breaking Ground in Sustainable Floristry,” and part three, “Beauty in Bloom,” of this three-part article.
Farm photos
