With a PhD in political science, Mary Beth McConahey never thought she’d end up as a commercial flower grower.
And when she did become a flower grower, she thought the growing itself would be the hardest thing.
It turns out that she was wrong on both counts, but that hasn’t necessarily been a bad thing.
Mary Beth grew up on the 10-acre Summer House property, and her widowed father still lives there. She says she always had a love of gardening and flowers, but never thought it would be more than a hobby.
Then she and her husband Steve had a kind of joint epiphany about 2½ years ago.
“I was prepared that the farming part of it was going to be hard,” she says. “Once I grew them, I thought they would just sell themselves — but that wasn’t the case. The failure was mine — in business, there are no shortcuts to success.”
She‘d like to change the view of cut flowers as an occasional extravagance, to one of an “everyday luxury” that adds necessary joy to life.
“I want people to think of flowers as something that makes a difference in your home and makes your day better,” she says.
One day, she says, she would like the farm itself to be “a full-blown, old-fashioned, immersive flower market”.