Sitting side by side in the small, unlit front office of an RV park, Dick Marlow and Gavin Hitt strike an interesting pair.
Marlow, the owner of the 5 Star RV Park on Lavender Road, is an ex-engineer with the land and the machinery to do the job. Hitt is a flower farmer who loves working in the soil. But perhaps no other combination would have made Sook Flower Farm flourish.
It was one of Marlow’s tenants at the RV park who first brought his attention to the plants Hitt was growing around his plot in the park.
The flowers were beautiful, the tenant had said, would Marlow consider letting Hitt plant more?
Marlow had always had intentions to do something with the rest of his property behind the park, but when he saw Hitt’s flowers, an idea struck him.
“If we’re gonna do it, we might as well do it commercially,” Marlow said. He turns to Hitt and asks, “Isn’t that right?”
Now, a year later, Sook Flower Farm has roughly two acres of farmable land, a reputable clientele of local florists, and a newly built high tunnel greenhouse they’re planning on using when the first freeze comes through in October.
But it hadn’t started that way.
It started as a single, three-fourths of an acre plot and a dream to sell locally grown flowers.
Marlow, a United Kingdom native, has lived all over the world — Qatar, Monaco, the south of France — and whatever country he hasn’t lived in, he’s probably passed through. He calls himself a “refugee” from oil companies, where he was hired to help with off-shore drilling until a power boating accident broke his back. He and his wife made their way up from Houston to Tyler, where he decided to buy the RV park because he is “not very good at sitting, doing nothing.”
Hitt, on the other hand, is Texan through and through. His accent speaks to his years growing up in Tyler, denotes his tenure at the former Tyler Lee High School. He left to live in California in the early 1990s and lived there for 15 years. Hitt insists he doesn’t have a green thumb — he’s killed a lot of plants, he says, to learn his craft. It was there he discovered his love for plants — and, he jokes, opened his eyes to the “evils of corporate America” and his passion for locally grown produce.
Now, their fields are blooming with healthy, vibrant fall flowers. Rows of celosia, zinnia and globe amaranth have whimsical names that match their oversaturated colors: carmine, firecracker and chief gold.
Up a hill, further back in the property, another field blooms in bright yellow. Rows and rows of sunflowers stretch back, all five feet tall or higher. They plant new rows frequently, usually around 500-800 sunflowers a week. It’s a staple flower for the summer and fall.
In a smaller patch, new rows have been freshly tilled in preparation for the next planting, this time for their winter flowers: stock flower, snapdragons and larkspur. They hope to have the seeds planted by Oct. 1, getting them in the ground before the freeze.
One of the difficulties of flower farming, Hitt explains, is having to plan two months ahead for each crop. They are constantly looking toward the future, guessing at what unique flowers florists want that other retailers might not have. But, Hitt says, “We also want to be smart about what’s going to work.”
Sook Flower Farm found its niche in East Texas for being locally grown and owned — and taking advantage of being the only commercial flower farm within an hour of many florist shops, Marlow explained.
“We cut today, and you put it in a vase today, and that’s gonna last a week to 10 days,” Marlow said. “The other flowers you buy, they’re grown in Israel, South Africa, and the northern part of South America. It all takes a lot of time, and in that time, they’re dry. They’re not getting fed, they’re not getting watered. They won’t last.”
Sook Flower Farm’s local focus is not only better for the local economy, but also better for the environment. Marlow believes that saving air and road transportation to buy locally “makes a lot of sense.” But they’re still the underdog in a large-scale game.
“The problem is that they can produce them in very large areas very, very cheaply,” Marlow said. “They’ve got massive amounts of space, cheap labor, and we’ve got neither of those two ... We have to build very slowly because we just can’t afford (it).”
In the meantime, they’re trolling their wares to local florists and selling farm-to-vase bouquets at farmer’s markets.
“We sell to Fresh every week, Flower Box, Lindale Floral, Flowers by Dora,” Hitt said, listing off just a few of the many places that buy their flowers. Getting their foot in the door at these florists might have just been the easiest part of the job.
“Well, we just walked in,” Hitt said. “I let (Marlow) do all the talking ‘cause he has an English accent.”
For Marlow, the flower farm felt like a call back from his childhood in England. His aunt had her own horticultural garden that he remembers fondly.
“I used to spend my weekends with her in her nursery helping her … so I knew a little bit about horticulture from a young boy’s point of view,” Marlow said. “I was very young, but it just sort of soaks in.”
August 17, 2020 at 05:51AM
https://tylerpaper.com/news/local/an-unlikely-tyler-pair-shines-light-on-east-texas-with-flower-business/article_e24fc010-e012-11ea-b719-f3d53c8975e5.html
An unlikely Tyler pair shines light on East Texas with flower business - Tyler Morning Telegraph
https://news.google.com/search?q=Flower&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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