Ep.98: Ellen Frost: The Florist Who Went All In on Local Flowers

Some of the most beautiful lives begin by accident. Ellen Frost was gifted a bag of tulip bulbs for her wedding. She had never planted a thing. She read the directions, put them in the ground, and when they came up that spring, something in her shifted. She grew up in a working class town in Buffalo with no connection to flowers or gardens or nature, and yet that one small spring miracle set the course for everything that came next. Today Ellen runs Local Color Flowers in Baltimore, one of the early pioneers of the local flower movement in this country. Every stem she uses is grown within a hundred miles of the city. But this conversation is about so much more than sourcing. It is about being a bridge between farmers and the people in your community. It is about the courage to say no so you can say a bigger yes. And it is about the relationships that turn out to be the real harvest. Ellen shares the moment she read Flower Confidential and understood the global flower system for the first time, the year she peaked at 150 weddings and nearly broke her body doing it, and the decision to scale down to 30 that saved her business. She talks about the farmer-florist relationship like the matchmaking it really is, and she gets honest about what she believes now that she did not believe when she started. Connect with Ellen and Local Color Flowers: * Website: https://www.ellenfrost.com/ * Local Color Flowers: http://locoflo.com/ * YouTube (weekly videos, her main home): https://www.youtube.com/@ellenfrostflowers * Substack, Flower Nerd: https://ellenfrostflowers.substack.com/ * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ellenfrostflowers ***Grab Your Dahlia Design Summit Ticket. Join us September 13 through 18. Six days of dahlia design taught by fourteen farmer florists and floral designers. Whether you're growing your first row or you're already selling to florists, every session is about doing more with the dahlias you already have in the ground. Live Pass is $147. All Access is $247 and you keep every session for life. Come join us: https://thefloweringfarmhouse.com/summit  ***