For this Oregon mother and daughter, a passion for flowers goes back generations

THE OREGONIAN

There are many ways to love flowers, even among family members. Joan Ewer Thorndike, an organic flower farmer and mom, carries delphiniums in her arms as she walks from one of her greenhouses into a warehouse at Le Mera Gardens in Northwest Medford.

She sets the tall stems with blue blossoms into a bucket of water, and smiles at her daughter Isabella Thorndike Church, who creates botanical installations through her company, Jacklily Seasonal Floral Design.

Joan then talks about her late mother, Lily, who pulled herself away from her home garden 10 minutes before she was to be at her office in the United Nations Building in Santiago, Chile.

Lily tended flowers to counter her stressful work on the Economic Commission for Latin America. Her apartment terrace had more plants than space to walk, and she couldn’t understand her daughter Joan’s Oregon business, one of the oldest organic, specialty cut commercial flower farms in the U.S.

How can you sell a flower, Lily would ask. How do you commercialize them, give them a monetary value? How do you part with them?

Joan, whose family’s passion for flowers reaches back generations, had a clear answer: Her goal is to put more locally grown flowers into people’s hands.

Read the full report in The Oregonian >

BY JANET EASTMAN