Taking the Farm to the City
Four times a year, we pack up a little piece of Bella Sera Farm and take it to Toronto.
Flowers, branches, buckets, baskets, tables, strange bits of wood, products from FIORI Botanicals, armfuls of greenery and usually at least one thing that makes someone ask, Are we really bringing that?
We are.
The destination is the Toronto Flower Market, where flower farmers from across Ontario descend on the park at CAMH with vans and trucks full of whatever happens to be blooming in their fields that week.
By morning, the park has become a spectacular flower market in the middle of the city.
Buckets of tulips in spring. Peonies and early summer flowers in June. Dahlias, cosmos, zinnias and sunflowers and great unruly branches later in the season.
For one day, once a month, Ontario's flower farms come to Toronto.
And we love being part of it.
A Little Slice of Paradise
Bella Sera Farm sits on seven acres in the hills of the Headwaters, and each time we come to the Toronto Flower Market, we try to bring a little bit of it with us.
Not simply the flowers.
The feeling of it.
We have never been particularly interested in putting up a table, lining up some bouquets and calling it a booth.
Instead, every market begins with the question: What world do we want to build this time?
Sometimes we bring old furniture from the farm. Sometimes we build new furniture. Sometimes baskets, branches or garden objects. Flowers climb walls, spill from vessels and appear in places they probably don't strictly need to be.
We think about how people will move through the space. Where they might stop. What they'll see first. What is blooming on the farm and how we can use it in a way that feels unexpected.
Each market gets its own little immersive installation.
It is temporary and slightly impractical.
Which is probably why we enjoy it so much.
For a few hours, a small piece of our farm exists in downtown Toronto.
Then we dismantle the whole thing and take it home again.
The Weeks Before
What looks effortless on market morning is decidedly less so behind the scenes.
Planning starts weeks ahead.
We talk about what should be blooming, what we want the booth to look like, what we need to build, what products we'll bring and how many bouquets we think we can realistically make.
Then we usually decide to make more.
As market week approaches, the weather becomes part of the conversation.
We watch the forecast obsessively. We walk the fields. We count stems that aren't quite ready and negotiate with flowers that are taking their sweet time.
Come on. Saturday.
The flowers, unsurprisingly, remain indifferent to our schedule.
By Tuesday and Wednesday, harvesting begins in earnest.
Buckets start accumulating in the flower studio. Then more buckets. And more buckets.
Flowers come in from the field, are stripped, sorted, conditioned and tucked into the cooler. Every stem is assessed. Some are destined for bouquets, others for bunches, and a few inevitably get pulled aside because they're too beautiful or strange not to become part of the installation.
By Thursday and Friday, the studio has shifted into full production.
Our goal is usually around 75 bouquets.
Seventy-five sounds quite reasonable when written on a planning sheet several weeks earlier.
It feels slightly different when you're standing in a studio surrounded by several hundred stems.
The Controlled Chaos
Market prep has its own particular rhythm.
Someone is making bouquets.
Someone is wrapping them.
Someone is looking for more elastic bands.
Someone is printing something that probably should have been printed yesterday.
There are price tags, buckets, water, boxes, extension cords, displays, flowers, signage, tools, FIORI Botanicals, retail bags, tissue paper and approximately seventeen things sitting beside the door with instructions that they absolutely cannot be forgotten.
Lists are written.
Lists are rewritten.
Things are checked off the lists.
Things that were checked off the lists mysteriously cannot be found.
The rental truck arrives.
And then comes the slightly alarming task of fitting a flower farm inside it.
The installation goes in. Then the furniture. Then the products. Then the market supplies. Then buckets and buckets of flowers, packed carefully enough that the work of the previous six months survives the drive into Toronto.
Eventually, the doors close.
Bella Sera Farm, temporarily, is on wheels.
Market Morning
Market mornings start early.
Very early.
The park is quiet when we arrive. Trucks are reversing. Farmers are unloading. Large rolling racks of buckets appear along the pathways. Half-built booths sit everywhere.
Then the transformation begins.
We unload our strange collection of farm things and start rebuilding the little world we've been imagining for the past several weeks.
Tables move three inches to the left.
Then two inches back.
Flowers are added.
More flowers are added.
Someone inevitably says, I think it needs something over there.
Eventually, we have to stop.
Because the proverbial gates open.
And suddenly, there are people everywhere.
Why We Keep Coming Back
This is the part we love.
People wander into the booth and stay awhile.
They smell things. They ask what a flower is. They want to know where something was grown. They tell us about their grandmother's garden or the peonies they have growing beside their house.
Someone remembers us from the last market.
Someone else tells us they bought a bouquet from us the year before.
People bring friends back to show them something. Children choose their favourite flowers. Gardeners want to talk varieties. Florists inspect unusual stems.
Stories begin.
And somewhere between selling bouquets and wrapping flowers, the booth becomes something else entirely.
A meeting place.
That, more than anything, feels like the heart of Nomadic Fiori.
We grow flowers, certainly.
We design with them. We make things from plants. We create installations and weddings and gatherings.
But underneath all of it is a desire to bring people together.
To know the person who grew the flower on your kitchen table.
To ask questions.
To share knowledge.
To tell stories.
To stand in the middle of a city park on a Saturday morning talking to a stranger about a particularly beautiful dahlia.
THAT is the beating heart of Nomadic Fiori.
From Our Field to the City
By the end of a Toronto Flower Market, the booth looks considerably different than it did at the beginning.
The buckets are empty.
The stacks of bouquets have disappeared.
The installation has been photographed hundreds of times.
Our feet hurt.
And our voices are usually starting to go.
Then we pack the farm back into the truck.
The furniture. The empty buckets. The baskets. The signs. Whatever remains of the installation.
And we drive home.
Back to the fields where the whole thing started.
Within a few days, we'll be walking the rows again. Cutting flowers, planting, weeding, deadheading and watching to see what is coming next.
Until eventually, another market appears on the calendar.
And we start imagining what little piece of our paradise we'll take with us next time.
