A Look Inside Our Flower Farm in Deal, Kent

Alongside our plants, we run a busy floristry service providing our customers with fresh, high-quality blooms, sourcing as much as we can from our flower farm. Our small, knowledgeable team at Forest knows the flower stock in great detail, helping us advise you on the best blooms that will hold the longest. With many of our flowers cut only a few miles away by the same people who'll help you choose them, it's a level of involvement that shapes the service we're able to provide, from the quality of the stems to the advice you get in our shops.

What we do at our Flower Farm

We're often asked about the origin of our flowers, with many customers keen to learn more about our flower farm. The season runs from March to October, giving us ample opportunity to produce popular blooms for our seasonal bouquets and, above all, our wedding flowers; a popular request at Forest from couples wanting British-grown blooms for their big day. 

It's a small plot in Deal, Kent, half an acre with a barn at one end, and it's where a good portion of the flowers you'll find at Forest come from. We bring freshly cut flowers to our shops twice a week. Even at full stretch, the farm can't meet every order on its own, particularly during peak season and for weddings, where customers often want flowers that aren't in season here. In those cases, the farm's flowers are used alongside carefully sourced ones from Norfolk, Kent and the Netherlands. Whoever we work with, we treat sourcing with as much care as we do our own homegrown flowers.

Our fresh, seasonal blooms

The season starts in spring with tulips, ranunculus and anemones, all planted the previous autumn to get ahead of the cold. As the weather warms, sweet peas take over, along with roses, larkspur and cornflowers. By late summer and into autumn, it's dahlias, zinnias, rudbeckia and grasses blooming through to October.

Right now, in the height of summer, it's the sweet peas that steal the show. They're picked most mornings, because the more you cut, the more they flower. Roses and larkspur come from the same beds, alongside cornflowers, which hold their colour well and are a favourite for adding texture to looser, more natural arrangements.

The quality of our flowers

Locally grown flowers tend to hold their scent better. They also tend to open more slowly and last longer once they're settled into a vase at home. But most importantly, we're able to cultivate each flower from seed to bloom, so we have full control over quality and outcome. We also embrace their natural growth allowing each crop to show its own variations, which is part of their beauty. This lends itself perfectly to our organic, wild-style arrangements, which have become somewhat of a trademark for us.

The Impact on the Environment

Our flowers are grown in the ground rather than under artificial light, and only when the season allows it, which means far less energy going into each stem before it ever reaches a customer. It's a small farm, so the impact is modest in scale, but it's a genuine and ongoing effort to grow flowers with a lighter footprint.

We’re hands on 

We love working with our hands, out in nature and at our London workshops. It's a genuine hands-on operation, with days spent watering, weeding, cutting and stocking up with fresh blooms every week. We split our time at the farm with time spent in the shop and workshop, where the flowers and plants are arranged, sold and turned into bouquets for weddings and events.

Growing our own flowers was about getting closer to where flowers actually come from, and being able to offer something genuinely local alongside everything else we sell. If you'd like to see what's in season, The Fresh Flower Company in East Dulwich and Forest in Deptford carry flowers from the farm whenever they're ready, alongside the wider range of plants and homeware Forest is known for.