Flowers at The Tree Farm

What We Raise, When It's Ripe
Today at The Tree Farm
How To Find Us

Flowers that dry
Flowers for special events
Cutting flowers
Our flowers

Pick your own FLOWERS at The Tree Farm

Sometime in the '70s, Kim, our elder son, then still in grade school, said that we should raise flowers for people to cut. We gave it little thought at first, but Kim was persistent. So we compromised. We told him that he could do the flowers as his project and keep whatever profits he made. The Tree Farm has had flowers to cut ever since. Kim moved on but the flowers remain a part of The Tree Farm scene. The project has grown from that first small flower patch to more than a half acre of flowers today. Many different kinds of flowers bloom in our flower patch from June through early October.

Some visitors to The Tree Farm walk in the flowers just to enjoy them, their colors, their fragrance. Some pick a bouquet to take home. Some give their children the fun and responsibility of picking the family bouquet. Nearly all of our customers find some way to enjoy the bright display of color right next to our scale building.

Flowers for special events

Some customers have enjoyed picking their own flowers to add a personal touch to their own special events. People have picked flowers at The Tree Farm for weddings, banquets, and other parties, large and small.

Flowers that dry

Many kinds of flowers can be dried. Because dried flowers aren't perishable, they can be used for special events at any time during the year. They can be picked, dried and even arranged months before an event. Statice and gomphrena from The Tree Farm have been used for February weddings. Decorations for fall events have included a mixture of dried flowers, ornamental gourds, and broom corn.

Flowers that dry From left to right: baby's breath, German statice, helichrysum, gomphrena and three different colors of statice.

Picked and dried at their peak, dried flowers store and can be used year round. The best times to pick flowers to dry are:

Baby's breath Our favorite fine textured baby's breath has a fairly short season. It needs to be picked the first or second week in July most years. The larger flowered baby's breath starts blooming in early June, and continues throughout the summer most years.

German statice is best if picked in late June or early July.

Gomphrena and helichrysum (straw flowers) are usually at their peak in August and early September. Although they continue to be available until frost, more care is needed to find quality blooms later in the season.

Statice starts blooming in late July, but the full array of colors sometimes isn't available until late September. Some of the blue varieties of statice are very slow to bloom.

Cutting flowers

Cutting flowers is easy. Just borrow a pair of scissors from the check out stand, select the flower you want, decide how long the stem needs to be to fit the vase you have in mind, and cut the stem at the appropriate place. Some people like to build a bouquet one flower at a time, making sure that each successive bloom fits into the bouquet before they cut it. Others seem to decide in advance what they want, and seek exactly the right blossom from the thousands in the field. Perhaps it will be nine matched red zinnias, or blue delphiniums in a baby's breath background. The only hard part is the fun part -- deciding what to pick when there are so many possibilities.

Flowers can be very perishable, particularly in hot weather. Many of our customers bring a container of water to put the fresh flowers in as they cut them. It's a good idea to make cutting flowers the last thing you harvest during each visit to The Tree Farm.

Our flowers

Flowers are fun to photograph. A picture of a beautiful flower can, itself, be beautiful. But it is a picture, not a flower. Communicating the sense and feel of the real thing and place is elusive. Here are a few pictures to suggest what our flower field is like.

Flowers and view looking east View east across our flowers.

zinnias Zinnias

Snapdragons

Tithonia Gloriosa Daisies

The Tree Farm
The Pick Your Own Vegetables Place
Cut your own Christmas Trees on December Weekends
In Northwestern Dane County, Wisconsin, serving Madison and the surrounding area
8454 Highway 19
Cross Plains, WI 53528
608.798.2286