My love affair with beautiful things sprouted quite some time ago. I grew up here in Chester County frolicking outside with my three sisters when the spring air was infused with the honeyed scents of viburnum bushes and hyacinth flowers. Surrounded by the lush farms in our historic corner of Pennsylvania, we’d comb the neighbor’s horses and wait for the apricot trees to show signs of waking up. In the summers we’d visit my father’s hometown in northern Italy, surrounded by backyard gardens and antiqued limestone walls blanketed in jasmine vines. We’d stroll the farm where my father grew up and explore the once fertile fields where his family grew sugar beets, tobacco and wheat for trade in his small town. He’d show us where the grape vineyards ended and where corn fields started and we'd weave our way through his old farmhouse that was now crumbling.  My father would explain where the silk worms were kept spinning their threads, their abandoned corner of the once-entryway now covered with wild poppies and fragrant oleanders bursting through broken stones and we were instantly transported to his childhood.  It was only years later that I realized how much I was learning about the value of small local agriculture and how important it is for the binding of a community. To me, as a child though, it was just the beauty—of those jasmine vines, of the scents and smells of the first blooms of spring, of the paper feel of the poppy flowers and of the amazing ability to cultivate something tangible from a tiny seed—that always made my heart skip a beat. And while all of this surrounding growth and beauty always stayed with me, it was how you could put it all together that finally allowed my vision to transcend.

How you could take something from the field grown in soil and transform it in a vase to evoke an emotion or set a stage was the real inspiration for this venture and, unbeknownst to me, was many years in the making watching my sweet mother craft incredible floral arrangements. For 30 years, she designed all of the flowers for our family’s ninety seat restaurant in the heart of this historic and beautiful little area of Pennsylvania we call home. She would arrange, with such precision of texture and color scheme, small clusters of seasonal blooms in ceramic vases thrown by the restaurant’s resident potter. Right from the kiln to the tables, the finished products were quiet and quaint, and always beautiful—much like the designer herself. And decades after learning from the best, I found myself in the exact same spot in the corner of our restaurant’s pastry kitchen, with the exact same snips, surrounded by buckets of flowers and designing small clusters of seasonal blooms for the same white clothed tables just as my dear mother had done for so many years before.

After nearly a decade in New York City, my husband and I decided it was time to trade skyscrapers and crowded apartment buildings for uninterrupted blue skies and open land that seems to go on for miles and we set our roots back in Chester County. I translated my event design experience from the Big Apple to smaller boutique weddings and events for our restaurant. I learned that floral design was what I truly loved about event planning— the luxurious petals that drape off of an arbor or the English ivy tips that brush the top of pressed linen tablecloths, ever so slightly creating a dreamy setting that guests can lose themselves in. I learned that every flower mattered. Every bit of foliage, bloom placement and, most importantly, “sparkly bit” created a depth and texture that had to be just right to achieve the visual of the piece and transform the space into something it wasn’t before. The methods were good, inspiring and exciting. The flowers, however, were not. And, after years of working with wholesale flower distributors, I found that I wasn’t getting exactly what I hoped for.

Flowers were limited and offerings less than unique. They were covered in chemicals or petals would come in bruised and beaten from a journey on planes, trains and automobiles from halfway across the world — yes, WORLD! The result: standard recipes for designs and a growing footprint that I didn't feel comfortable with. I still wanted to design exceptional florals. I wanted to continue my mother’s legacy of beauty, to feel her spirit and be inspired by the beauty around me. So, I decided to pivot. Not only did I decide to continue creating floral arrangements with all those perfect ethereal feels, I started to grow the very flowers that take center stage in these striking pieces.

In 2013, the seed of Seven Stems Flowers was planted with merely nine heirloom dahlia tubers (a flower I had heard about often but could never seem to get my hands on from my wholesale flower vendors) and two bags of compost, driven by my passion to keep my mother’s natural spirit of beauty alive and to keep contributing to this incredible community in our corner of the globe.

While we still use some flowers from other growers for weddings and events, in season 99% of the flowers we use are grown by Seven Stems Flowers right here in Chester County. And when our customers have to have that peony a week before ours have popped, we'll always use our network of other local flower farmers to source blooms from when our season hasn't yet sprung! 

We’re so excited to grow with you and for you! We’re happy to share our blossoming love affair with you, to teach you our secrets and to share our blooms with you.