In her second trip to GardenView Flowers in Grand Rapids, Ohio, Cheri Outly came with a plan: She headed toward a row of gladiolus, her favorites. Their relative height would be a dramatic anchor for a bouquet to brighten up her mother’s nursing home room.
In her first trip to GardenView Flowers, Brandy Outly was a little less discerning in the bouquet she was putting together. As she meandered through the garden with her mother on Sunday, Brandy, 14, paused to snip whenever a stem would really catch her eye, adding it to a colorful collection of marigolds, snapdragons, zinnias, and more.
Her favorite of the bunch? She paused to consider.
“I think I like the poppies,” she said.
What: GardenView Flowers U-Pick Flower Field
When: 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through September
Where: 11160 S. River Rd., Grand Rapids, Ohio
Admission: For $12, visitors receive a 4-inch cup to fill with flowers. Staff wrap bouquets in newspaper; vases are available for purchase at the Flower Stop.
Information: gardenviewweddings.com/upickflowers
GardenView Flowers this year debuted a quarter-acre or so of blooms for visitors like the Outlys to peruse on weekends, sets of clippers and 4-inch cups in hand. For $12, families, couples, and individuals are invited to explore designated rows on the family flower farm, mixing-and-matching stems for a unique take-home bouquets.
While the do-it-yourself instructions that visitors receive before stepping into the cutting garden are familiar to anyone who’s ever picked their own blueberries or strawberries or apples, GardenView appears to be the first farm in the area to apply the “u-pick” model to flowers.
“I think everyone who has been here has enjoyed the experience,” said Ellie Van Houtte, whose family has been running the farm since the 1970s.
“You're creating something, you’re making something. It’s kind of art in the garden,” she continued. “People get to take something home that has meaning. It’s not just something they picked up off the grocery shelf. I think that’s what makes it really special.”
The U-Pick Flower Field, 11160 S. River Rd., is open 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays through September. Located just off the road, with signs along the route leading a driver right to it, it’s essentially a miniaturization of the approximately 30 acres that the family cultivates with the same wide variety of flowers that visitors can find in the cutting garden.
Think asters, ammi magi, celosia, cosmos, dahlias, gladiolus, salvia, statice, sunflowers, snapdragons, and zinnias.
The Van Houttes steer the yield of these more expansive fields primarily toward farmers’ markets — they’re regulars in Toledo and Perrysburg — as well as a parallel floral design business headed by Jenny Van Houtte.
Jenny Van Houtte is Ellie Van Houtte’s sister; they’re behind the latest endeavor at the farm. Their father, Gerald Van Houtte, is still involved in the business, too. He started the farm in 1972 and eventually oversaw a shift away from produce and toward flowers.
Ellie Van Houtte said the u-pick garden developed out of conversations with their farmers’ market clientele.
“They’re really interested in what happens behind the scenes: How are the flowers grown? How do you actually make this happen?” she said. “Everything is so pretty when it comes to market.”
They introduced farm tours and design workshops last year, she said, as one way to answer these questions and bring customers into the process that ends in the carefully curated bouquets that they see at weddings and market booths. That was a hit, Ms. Van Houtte said.
The u-pick continues in that vein and has likewise proved popular, she said, drawing more than 100 visitors in its opening weekend in mid-July. The recent heat wave hasn’t seemed to stem interest, either, with visitors checking out the garden even in the heat of the midday.
Ms. Van Houtte said the show-stopper stars in the u-pick garden are the dahlias and gladiolus.
“That’s the first thing that people go for,” she said.
Jessica O’Loughlin, of Erie, Mich., let her daughter, Chrissy, design much of the kitchen-table bouquet they put together during an early trip on Sunday. At just a year old, Chrissy couldn't know a daisy from a dahlia, but she seemed to know what she liked.
“I don’t let her use the scissors,” her mother said, “but if she points, I’ll cut it for her.”
“She loves it,” she said. “All the colors, everything to pick. It’s just beautiful.”
Like the Outlys, who came from Whitehouse, Ms. O’Loughlin and her daughter are repeat visitors. They came for a pre-opening weekend earlier this month.
Ms. Van Houtte said they hope to see more like them. Visitors don’t need to worry about a picked-over selection, she said. And while some varieties of flowers bloom all summer, they also planted so that a visitor who comes in July can expect to incorporate different varieties in their bouquet if they return in August.
“It might be completely different than the first bouquet they picked, not only because of the diverse variety of the flowers, but also because the flowers change with the season,” Ms. Van Houtte said. “The garden kind of evolves as the year unfolds.”
First Published July 22, 2019, 6:03 p.m.
