You → Field → Flowers → Home

It’s tulip season again. We once invited you into something unhurried: meandering through rows of blooms, choosing stems that spoke to you, sharing stories over the fence. That’s been replaced, for now, by the shuffle of multiple harvests per day, the chill of cold storage and the logistics of moving blooms from place to place.

I feel so much angst bubble up when we’re forced to buy equipment the farm never needed to share flowers in the past or having to plan to keep the animals locked up for the day just to move flowers off-site. What was once a direct and joyful exchange:

You → field → flowers → home 

has been turned into something cold and fragmented:

Field → cold storage → transport → (+/-) shop → You → home.

And it’s not just the logistics. I never wanted to go into the business of just selling flowers. I don’t derive meaning from dropping off bouquets at doorsteps and driving away. The heart of this farm was never the product, it was the presence. It was the exchange of stories, of knowledge, of watching kids who were once shy bloom into chatterboxes when they spot funky bugs. It was elders sharing memories of gardens past, or visitors lingering longer than planned because something about the place made them feel calm, curious, connected.

We were building something slow and real, something rooted in the rhythms of the seasons and in connection to one another. And after nearly two years of social distancing, that mattered more than ever. People were craving presence, softness, something tangible. For meeting each other outside of algorithm and agenda. Between flowers and wonder. That’s what’s been lost. And this is what the village of Barrington Hills has chosen as its vision of charm and order.

If any part of this resonated—if you believe slowness and human connection still have a place in the world you want to help build, or if you’ve felt the ache of something slipping away before it had the chance to blossom here in the Barrington area—know this:

There’s still time to shape what this place becomes.