WiLD HEART FARM
Cultivating beauty, vitality, resilience and love
After 20 years working to catalog and protect the plants in wild landscapes like the Grand Canyon, I wondered if I could make a difference conserving habitat and connecting people at a smaller scale. The dream having my own flower farm had been keeping me awake at night for years. In 2015 I completed an apprenticeship in sustainable agriculture at UC Santa Cruz, in preparation to become a farmer.
The moment we stepped through the gate we knew this was the place. The land practically pulled us into her shady bosom in a loving embrace. Giant Arizona ash trees tower above in a riparian canopy and beneath them grows a diverse array of twenty fruit trees including mulberries and an ancient pear that must be close to 100 years old. Our farm is situated in the unceded territory of the Yavapai-Apache Nation, whose current tribal lands now consists of roughly 600 acres in five non-contiguous parcels of land in the Verde Valley of central Arizona.
In 2020, just as the pandemic hit, I quit a full-time gardening job and began planting flowers. Amidst the uncertainty, I wanted to transmit hope by sharing these flowers with people in need of encouragement and healing. No one was getting married. Everyone was struggling. Disposable income was hard to come by. Yet, by some miracle, 15 people had invested in the idea of a CSA (community supported agriculture) share—a weekly subscription of fresh flowers grown by me on this land. This community was literally supporting me with upfront dollars in my pocket when all the weddings I had on the calendar were postponed indefinitely. I was incredibly grateful for a community that believed I could do this, as even I doubted it was possible. It was at that time that I realized how the flowers (and poems I tucked into the paper wrapping) offered a heartfelt message and the soul nourishment to uplift spirits during this challenging time.
I traded one million acres for one acre. After three years, I can see that we are making a positive impact on our neighborhood, in the lives of our customers, and in the habitat we created for species in need of refuge, such as the endangered Monarch butterfly.
The name Wild Heart Farm comes from my lifetime love of wild flowers. For many years as a botanist I studied flowers in wild places, watching how they adapted and survived rooted in place. As I got older I yearned to study and live with plants more intimately and intentionally. Plants yearn to be wild. They want to make seed, to ramble beyond the confines of the trellis and their roots can only survive so long in a pot and then they grow static. Humans also need to connect to that wild, untidy, chaotic, magical unknown place in our hearts—the place we knew as children before the rules and confines of the world told us otherwise. The place we could be lost in the backyard or alley or riding bikes through the neighborhood for hours while time disappeared and our parents called us in from the dark. The place where we were unfettered and free, and we can hear the voice of knowing inside our hearts.
Our synergy is rooted in the soil, where life begins. This same soil nurtures the plants we grow and in turn nurtures us from a deep place. Both farming and healing are soul work and sharing the abundance, the beauty, the medicine and what we learn in this place is our offering to the world.