From corporate lawyer to flower farmer (and back again): the real version

In December 2020, journalist Jess Lantry and photographer Jess Porter from HUNTERhunter came to The Little Urban Flower Farm.

They found five kids (four still at home), a twelve-year-old border collie named Daisy who was - according to the article - "flat out with her new farm life," a house rabbit named Archie who had claimed the top floor of the house as his personal domain (and ate any books we foolishly left within reach), and one tonne of organic vegetables grown from soil that had been compacted and near-dead when we bought the property a couple of years before.

They also found me. Freshly out of a career as a corporate lawyer and CEO of an international association. Growing seasonal, organic flowers in the middle of Maitland City. Wearing overalls. Meaning every bit of it.

Jess Porter's photography captured the farm at its most gloriously fecund - native bees, blue tongue lizards, frogs, butterflies, a chaos of seasonal blooms. The story had a clean arc. Woman leaves high-flying career, swaps suit for overalls, grows flowers, finds joy - cut to sunny skies and eternal bliss.

It was a tidy story. It was also incomplete.

Here is the rest.

The part that didn't make the article.

In 2019, I walked away from corporate life. A generous income, an international title, the whole architecture of a life that looked - from the outside - like success.

"I think we can sometimes have a view of ourselves, or we can get caught up in seeing ourselves through the lens of other people's perception," I told Jess at the time. "Stepping away from such a role can take a realignment."

What I didn't say was that the realignment would take rather longer than I expected. That life is expensive. That flower farms - especially ones built on no-dig, regenerative, organic principles, on land that needs years of soil-building before it really sings - take time. That bringing an old house back from the brink takes even longer. That my reality includes a second life in France, and no way of getting there without money and air miles I can't pretend are consequence-free.

So I went back.

Not to a law firm. But to an executive role. Back on planes. Back spending our earth’s precious resources like they are monopoly money. An Executive Director position that creates its own kind of cognitive dissonance for someone who cares deeply about soil health and regenerative growing and the ethics of how we produce things.

I grow flowers on the days I am home. I fly around the country attending board meetings on the days I am not. I keep both things going and try not to think too hard about what that says about me.

I think some version of this deeply contradictory life is most people's reality. Wars fought in the name of peace. Greenwashing from companies we trust (and who know better). Teachers and doctors and people who build play centres for other people's children, putting their own munchkins into daycare to do it. We are almost all, in some way, living at odds with our own values. My life is far from perfect. The farm is far from perfect. I grow things anyway.

What grew in the meantime

Somewhere in the middle of all this commuting and the growing and the board meetings (and the angst), I started sharing what I knew. Nine years of flower farming. Of learning which seeds need cold stratification and which ones will rot if you so much as mist them with too much water. Of timing successions so you still have flowers in May and not just bumper crop in December. Of building soil from nothing - from compacted, bleak, neglected ground - using no-dig methods, letting finished plants feed the earth, welcoming the weeds that shade the soil and attract the beneficial insects.

Of failing, season after season, and coming back anyway.

I started teaching it. Quietly at first, then more deliberately. And that became The Flower Growing Year - a 12-month online course where students receive a seed packets and printed instructions in the mail every month, and corresponding digital lessons and step by step videos unlock as the seasons turn. Real seeds. Real timing. A real community of women growing flowers alongside each other.

The women who join are not waiting for a perfect garden. They are growing flowers in courtyards and balconies and narrow side strips and rented backyards. They are growing flowers while working full-time and raising children and renovating houses that are taking considerably longer than anyone planned.

They remind me of myself, which is probably not a coincidence.

What I tell them

You do not need a Pinterest-ready garden to grow flowers. You do not need to have left your corporate job. You do not need to have figured out what you are supposed to be doing with your life. You need seeds. You need soil.

You need enough curiosity to begin.

The farm is mid-renovation right now. The earthworks were significant - I am still, genuinely, in recovery. Daisy is gone. Archie the rabbit is gone. The tonne of vegetables is a fond memory. The dog these days is slightly manic Bonnie, who has a different relationship with farm life than Daisy did (less philosophical, more enthusiastic, equally unhelpful).

But the soil we built - slowly, over years, using methods that add life rather than extract it - is still there - albeit piled up in a heap with grass growing through it. The knowledge is still there. The belief that growing flowers is worth doing, in whatever conditions you actually have, is absolutely still there.

If you want to see the farm in its first wild chapter, the HUNTERhunter piece here is a wonderful archive.

And if you are ready to start growing - imperfect garden, complicated life, and all -The Flower Growing Year is open. Click here to learn more.