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Bloom | Spring 2018
In 2013, Erin Benzakein (pictured above) was a moderately successful flower farmer
in Washington’s Skagit Valley, about an hour north of Seattle. She and her husband,
Chris, met in high school and had come to the valley a dozen years before, as young
urbanites in search of a rural dream, and bought a house on an acre of land. Surrounded
by modest farms, the place wasn’t much to look at: vinyl siding, an old garage out back.
By then, the couple had a daughter. (A son was born 19 months later.) While Chris found
work as a mechanic, Benzakein, who had been a landscaper in Seattle, looked for ways
to earn money at home. She tried candle-making, growing baby vegetables, a rainbow-
egg business with a hundred chickens. But, she said, “I didn’t make any money, and
there was poop everywhere.” The flower idea came five years later, in 2006, when she
saw an article by the floral designer Ariella Chezar on arranging clematis. This totally
blew Benzakein’s mind, because she’d always considered it an extravagance to cut
garden flowers like clematis and bring them inside. They were for display in the garden.
Which is largely why almost no one in the Skagit Valley would buy her flowers once she
started hustling them. Her total profit the first year was $1,400.