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US (OR): Chilean flower grower follows her love

If you’re invited to dinner at someone’s house here, you might bring a dish to share. But in Santiago, Chile, where Joan Ewer Thorndike grew up, that’s an insult to the cook. So flowers are the gift of choice, and on many street corners there were stands selling inexpensive, beautiful blooms.

Which was why Thorndike’s jaw dropped the first time she saw flowers for sale in San Francisco: $5 for a single flower.

“I was absolutely stunned,” she said. “It made my head reel.”

She realized American florists were focused on what she calls the “Hallmark holidays,” and put together giant arrangements for hotel and concert hall lobbies or “roundy-moundy” baskets with flower stems stuffed into foam. Not to mention fake floral displays.

“A plastic flower is a thing,” Thorndike sniffs. “It’s not a flower.”

She allows none of that in her organic cut flower business, Le Mera Gardens. It was an Ashland, Ore., flower farm that had fallen into disrepair, and Thorndike and others had attempted to keep it going. At the time she was looking for a business that would allow her to keep her young daughters out of childcare while providing a bit of additional income, and growing flowers seemed an ideal way to do that. In 1992 she took over the lease, and her daughters spent much of their summers and after-school hours roaming freely on the farm.

Read more at Capital Press
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