Telling people that I’ve moved back to our family farm to grow flowers usually gets an envious response. Occasionally, people will look at me as if I’m a little deluded.

What no one could imagine, though, was the stir that our acre plot of flowers would create. Fortunately, Rebekah, my cousin and business partner, likes nothing more than some verbal sparring among the flowerbeds and I’m not averse to a bit of excitement. But over a cut-flower garden? Our first sniff of controversy came when a well-to-do lady on my Royal Horticultural Society course asked, in all seriousness, if our business was going to threaten her friends’ Kenyan flower business. And that was before we’d even erected our rabbit fencing. “Wouldn’t that be lovely?” I said with a beatific smile.

A gently sloping acre of land on top of the Greensand ridge in Kent is where we have launched our supposed assault on the global flower industry; our headquarters is an old mushroom shed built by our grandfather in the 1950s. We get a few raised eyebrows when we explain that we grubbed up a Bramley apple orchard to make way for our flowers, but this is what happens when fruit trees come to the end of their productive life.

We now have rows of insect-friendly flowers and shrubs — Echinacea, Achillea, Buddleia, sunflowers, Ageratum — and a veritable zoo of honey bees, butterflies and ladybirds. It’s not unusual for a ladybird to drop out of one of our bouquets or to find a sleeping bumblebee in one of our flower buckets.

But it’s not just about wildlife — we need to make a living. Our aim is to sell chemical-free, English flower bouquets as well as arranging flowers for “green” weddings and events. Informal market research convinced us that there was a market for local, seasonal flowers sold in compostable packaging.

As a journalist, I already knew about the negative impact of the flower industry on the environment and the working conditions on flower farms in developing countries. My cousin’s background in environmental biology and conservation meant that she needed no convincing — although an initial suggestion of running a florists’ shop together did not go down well.

A partnership between my slightly impractical idealism and knack with flowers and her immensely practical environmental background seemed the perfect foundation for the company we called Blooming Green.

Our location also filled us with hope, as did my mothers’s assurance that “you can grow anything in that soil”. Yet, after we had planted-up most of our raised beds we mentioned some of the problems we were encountering to Rebekah’s father, my uncle Alan. “Never did get a decent crop off that field,” he said, sucking his teeth. “It was always waterlogged.”

Still, in April we opened a small bottle of bubbly over our newly tilled raised beds, filmed by a Channel 4 TV crew who wanted to catch the highs and lows of our new venture for a new series with Monty Don, which will be broadcast next year. After the excitement of our expanding flower patch and the promise of a whole field of flowers I went skiing, and came back with a broken leg. Shortly afterwards Bek announced that she was pregnant.

But, with help from friends and family and a lot of hard graft on Bek’s part — while I sat with my leg up, making not entirely helpful suggestions — we got our seeds and plugs planted. For a while the situation was dicey, but eventually, by May, things were germinating and our plug plants were thriving — as were the weeds. Our first job of the year was called off after the bride came to see the plot on a wet and windy day and burst into tears. But looking back, that day was the turning point.

We got on top of the weeds and, in the past couple of months, have been blessed with a mixture of sunshine and showers. Some flowers have worked, and others not, but we’ve covered our options by trying a wide range of species. We also know several flower growers so that, when in need, we know who to call for peonies, lavender and long-stemmed sweet peas.

Farmers’ markets are a different challenge because everything we sell has to come from our plot. At Tunbridge Wells, our first market, we sold bouquets that included sunflowers, slightly obscene Amaranthus, larkspur and Bupleurum. They sold well. So it doesn’t seem to be our customers that we need to convince. Rather it’s the industry itself that is in need of a shake-up. Rather like a Gertrude Jekyll rose, the floristry business is gorgeous and scented on top, but rather unpleasant and thorny underneath.

We found this out during a photoshoot for My Wedding Flowers Ideas magazine, when a national flower organisation that usually helps out on such occasions refused to source English flowers to supplement our own. In the end we used our own flowers, those from a neighbour and some roses from Essex. The magazine’s stylist welled up when she saw them.

This is the kind of effect we like our flowers to have. Whether it’s nostalgia for how bouquets used to be, or someone’s total surprise and curiosity over the quirky seed pods, foliage and flowers we’ve mixed together. What better way to disguise a serious environmental message? To some extent we’re in this for the idyllic moments gathering flowers, for the long tea breaks in our shed and the chance to run our own business. But if, in the process, we can shake things up a bit and make people think about where their flowers come from, then all the better.

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