For many who have developed an interest in agriculture, the paths that led farmer-florists Kellee Matsushita-Tseng, Emily Saeger, and Molly Culver to flowers may sound familiar.
“Farming for me was the convergence of all the things that I felt that I wanted to work on and cared about—in terms of community health, environmental justice, and a re-storying of our approach to land and plants and food,” says Kellee Matsushita-Tseng, who is leading the panel “Sustainable Farming x Floral Design” at the Slow Flowers Summit in June. After some earlier work with youth empowerment programs, Kellee began farming and is now an educator and instructor at CASFS (The Center For Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems) at UC Santa Cruz.
Emily Saeger, Lead Horticulturist at Filoli in Woodside, CA, similarly found her way to farming through an interest in social and environmental justice. After undergraduate school, “I was feeling a bit lost and sort of lacking in tangible skills, and I was really wanting to work with my hands,” Emily says. After studying international relations, Emily quickly came to the understanding that “working from an outside-in perspective doesn’t really help anyone, that change is really from the ground up.”
Molly Culver, owner of Molly Oliver Flowers, a Brooklyn, NY-based floral design studio, describes her experience living abroad in Chile and working with community gardens in the Bronx as instrumental in stoking her desire to contribute to agricultural systems that “respected land and culture.” The “connection between social justice and environmental stewardship is ages old,” she says, “and the desire to build a more just and sustainable future drives me in my work.”