Life on the Petalon Flower Farm 

Meet Florence and James, the couple who run Cornwall-based, carbon neutral flower delivery service, Petalon.


Surrounded by rolling hills and blooming flower buds, we spent a sunny afternoon with Florence and James on their Cornish flower farm where they run Petalon, a carbon neutral flower delivery company founded by Florence.

Using a colourful combination of flowers that have been either imported or picked from their own fields, each Petalon bouquet is arranged by hand in the farm’s old stone barns. We caught up with them to chat about life on the farm and how things have changed since their move to Cornwall.

Could you introduce yourself and tell us about Petalon?

Petalon started off as a London-based flower delivery service by bicycle, sourcing flowers from either the UK or Holland. We had planned to move to Cornwall with our family but, when the pandemic hit, we decided to move the business with us – which turned out to be the best decision because we can grow flowers down here. This started a new chapter, allowing us to supplement our bouquets with our own flowers, as well as offering our field flowers grown on the farm as a separate product.

What does an average day on the Petalon flower farm look like?

The team start work at 6.30am, the flowers need to be cut when it’s cool and the polytunnels get very hot during the day. They finish cutting around 9am which means all the new flowers can go online for our customers to buy on a next day service. Our florists arrive at 8am to start making up the bouquets from our import flowers, wrapping them up, sending them out and fulfilling all the orders for the day. The field team also start with their tasks, which can be anything from sowing seeds and prepping beds to weeding, planting out and strimming.

Is there a creative process behind putting together each bouquet?

I’ve been making Petalon bouquets now for nine years and, in that time, you learn what travels well and what doesn’t – and what I might like but that the customer doesn’t like as much. It’s a delicate balance between a bombproof flower variety that’s going to last in someone’s home but also something seasonal and beautiful that I love. I also love to be able to show our customers something different that they might not have seen before.

Do you have a favourite flower for each season?

Spring

My favourite flower for spring is always Ranunculus. They are so fussy but, here in Cornwall, they will grow through March and April, kickstarting the season for us. You get them in every colour and shape imaginable, amazing ones with tie-dye petals or stripes, I cannot get enough of them.

Another surprise favourite is Stocks, they smell unbelievable and are exactly the sort of thing we want to do. By the time you open the box, you get this lovely perfume hit in the same way you would with sweet peas.

Delphiniums are my favourite thing we grow full stop really. They are the size of a small tree and our problem with Delphiniums is finding a box big enough to put them in. They are so beautiful; I have never found anyone who doesn’t think they are amazing – I think people are used to seeing foxgloves in the wild in Cornwall and they remind people of them.

Summer

Zinnias are my dream flower and, even though you can buy them, they always arrive quite brown and mushed up. It turns out they don’t like the cooler, so they don’t like to go in a flower fridge. It was a learning curve last year with Zinnias – not putting them in the cooler before sending them out to customers, but to be able to get those shades, lovely sandy peachy colours, two-tone lime and terracotta, I just love them.

Autumn

In Autumn, we grew Chrysanthemums last year and they were amazing. We were still cutting them in December – to be cutting a flower, even in Cornwall, in December is pretty amazing. Our Daffs and Ranunculus start to come through in February, so the Chrysanthemums were really the star of the show. To have something we are taking all the way through the Autumn and starting to bridge the end of the season is amazing.

Winter

Winter is when we do all the muddy stuff, but I love our early Daffodils in February. We try to find ones that don’t look the same as the ones everyone sees in spring. Classic Daffodils are still amazing, in the same way that any classic flower is, but it was great to try to send people a variation on that theme. It was really fun this year, not something we did at all last year.

What inspired your move to Cornwall?

When we were still living in Hackney, and our first child Clover had just been born, we ended up taking on an old dairy. We built a little flat upstairs and turned the downstairs into a shoot location and a wedding venue. The four years we were in there spoilt us for space, and we realised quite quickly that we were going to need that kind of space long term.

We started looking around on auction sites and when this place popped up, we came down and had a look and realised all our worst fears were confirmed – it was totally perfect as a place for us. We weren’t thinking about what county we were in, where we were situated and what was nearby. The buildings and the land around it were exactly what we dreamed of for bringing up our kids.

When the pandemic hit, we quickly realised that we should bring Petalon with us. Make this the new home of the business and use all the land, space and climate that was going to be available to us here. We’ve been here two and a half years and, now that we’re here, it seems fairly obvious that we will never leave.

Do you have any favourite spots in Cornwall for getting inspiration?

The farm is two valleys back from the sea which means that we can grow stuff without getting everything covered in seawater, but we can be on the beach in five minutes. On the spur of the moment on a Sunday morning, we can grab our breakfast and take the kids and the dog to have brunch on the beach at 9am if we fancy it. The freedom to do that is rare and to be able to do it on such an amazing stretch of coastline is a privilege that I hope we never take for granted.

For inspiration, the Lost Gardens of Heligan is probably our favourite – I think we take the kids once a month. Between there and the Eden Project, you could easily go once and never go back but you’d be making a mistake. It’s different every time you go depending on what’s in flower and what vegetables are growing.

We love how much Petalon cares about the environment, could you tell us more about that? 

We’re certified carbon neutral as a business. Having measured our inputs, the stuff we do here and then what happens to our flowers and packaging once they arrive in people’s homes. We offset that through planting projects in the UK and Nicaragua through Climate Partner. There’s lots of info about that on our website where you can see what we do. 

On the farm, we’ve taken on 85 acres which was previously used for industrial agriculture. We don’t till our land, turn over any of the soil or break up fungal networks that exist – so we’ve increased the organic matter here from around 4% to 16% which on its own will sequester way more carbon than our business will produce over the next three years, but that’s all separate to the certification. Then, at the moment, we leave half (eventually it will be a third) of all our land to be a wild habitat for the local environment.  

We also donate all of the end of year profits from Petalon to UK conservation projects. Florence and I are paid a salary from the business and we don’t need dividends on top of that to incentivise us to do a good job. We want our customer to know that they are paying for the product and to make sure it is accounted for in terms of its environmental impact – anything that’s leftover is going back to the environment. 

If you’ve been inspired by Petalon’s passion for flowers, you can find Florence’s tutorial for arranging a seasonal floral bud vase here. 

You can keep up with Florence and James on Instagram @petalon_flowers and find flowers for order on their website.