Flower Farm Thrives in D.C. Market

Diversity is Wollam Gardens' recipe for a long season and high-end sales

by Lynn Byczynski

reprinted by permission from Growing For Market, May 2001

Flower grower Bob Wollam has succeeded in the competitive Washington, D.C., market with a simple formula: grow everything imaginable, grow lots of it and grow it well. His 4 acres of cut flowers, with more than 100 varieties of bulbs, woodies, annuals and perennials, keep him selling from the first week of April until the end of October.


Bob's farm, Wollam Gardens, is in Jeffersonton, a hamlet in northern Virginia about an hour outside of Washington. His land is gently rolling, and his fields are carved out here and there around the property - a few flat acres behind the house, a hillside with rows of shrubs, another flat field on top of the hill, yet another field down by the road. The parcels all follow the contour of the land, and are separated by grassy paths and waterways to help with drainage. Everything is mowed, and the beds are free of weeds. The farm feels like a series of well-tended gardens.


Bob's neatness is part aesthetic, part function. "I can't stand not being able to find the things I need to operate," he says. "If I keep things weeded and neat, I really am more productive. Lately I've been putting a lot more work into keeping things neat, like buying mulch and wood chips. I'm investing in neatness, but in the end I have better plants."


Bob is a plant lover, pure and simple. He refers to growing flowers as his addiction and it's obvious to even the casual visitor that he truly enjoys what he does for a living. He loves to search out and trial new or old varieties that might make good cuts. One year, he went through the Jelitto catalog of perennial seeds and ordered everything that had the scissors symbol, which denotes a plant good for cutting. Bob started them in a trial plot; some got the nod and were moved into the production beds; others were relocated to the pleasure garden next to the house.


Many of his plants have a history that involves the flower-farming friends Bob cultivates as enthusiastically as his flowers. The Viburnum macrocephalum, which blooms all summer, came from North Carolina with Betsy Hitt. The tall perennial sunflower Helianthus 'Flora Pleno' , which was the star of last summer's farm tour, came from Kathy York in Maryland. Bob has been involved in the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers for many years, is a regular at national conferences, and is currently the regional director for the Mid-Atlantic region.


"It's a wonderful organization of great people doing what they want to do," he says of the ASCFG. "Our organization is a whole lot of people who are doing this as a second career. They've come to it with a passion, and they are willing to share and be helpful."

Bob himself came to flowers as a second career, and not one that he was really expecting. "I never really cared about flowers till I was in my 30s, but after that, I just loved gardening. I thought 'Why can't I do this for a living?' but I was on the corporate path and was making a lot of money and thought I needed certain things."


Bob worked for Exxon and his senior marketing position took him to the Far East. But everywhere he lived, he bought a farm where he could garden.


"I spent most summers when I was a kid at my grandparents' farm in upstate New York. My grandfather was a wonderful man, a very educated man, and he loved farming. My grandmother loved flowers - she had a fabulous perennial garden."


When Bob left Exxon in 1986 and moved to Washington, D.C., to start another business, he soon got the itch to garden again and started looking around for a place in the country. He found his hillside farm, with a dilapidated, 200-year-old farmhouse, and set to work on restoring it.


That summer, he and his wife, Judy Taylor, were touring the wine country in upstate New York with friends when they visited a Pick-Your-Own cutting garden. "I got back in the car and said to everybody, 'This is what I want to do,'" Bob says.
Bob grew some zinnias and a few other flowers, and took them to a florist in Washington. The florist told him to get growing and he would buy it all, so for the first two years, Bob grew exclusively for that florist, who remains his best customer.


Over the years, Bob has expanded to about 10 other florists in the city, plus two of Washington's most lucrative farmers' markets, at Alexandria on Saturdays and DuPont Circle on Sundays. Last year, he hired someone to do a mid-week market in Warrenton,the city nearest his farm, and this year, he plans to send someone to the Saturday market there. His sales are now equally divided between florists and farmers' markets.


In addition to his cut flowers, he also sells a great many potted plants at farmers' markets. Most are extras of his cutting varieties, although he does offer a few non-cutting plants that are hard to find at garden centers. He sells potted anemones and labels them "the pansy alternative" and he does well with pots of moonflower, morning glory and Datura inoxia. The American Farmland Trust, which operates the DuPont Circle market, requires farmers to list everything they grow to help ensure that no one brings products they didn't grow themselves. Bob's list of flowers for this year's market is reprinted on the previous page, and gives a sense of the huge variety of plants he grows.


Peonies are one of the specialties at Wollam Gardens. Bob has 1,200 mature plants, which produce about $12,000 a year in income. White is the best-selling color in his market, so he grows a lot of 'Festiva Maxima'. 'Sarah Bernhardt' and 'Mons. Jules Elie', both pinks, are also popular. He has about 50 plants each of eight other varieties. He is most excited about 'Red Charm', a huge red double that is extremely hard to find and is being lovingly propagated at Wollam Gardens.


Bob has so many "favorite" flowers that it's hard to focus on just a few. But as he walks around his farm, talking about the things he grows, he seems particularly enthusiastic about these:

* White foxglove, which is so popular he's able to sell a 200-foot bed of it.
* Baptisia australis, the blue false lupine, is grown for its blue pea-like flowers in June, but the fresh green foliage is also used for a longer period. Bob has 400 feet of the perennial plants.
*Artemisia is a big item, popular for its silver foliage. Bob grows Cramer's Silver from The Cramer Collection. (See the ad on page 16.)
* Mountain mint, Pycnanthimum muticum, is a favorite filler with a nice fragrance; also from Cramer's.
* P.G. hydrangea in a tree form were more expensive to purchase, but Bob prefers them to the shrub form because they don't need to be supported to keep the big white flowers from drooping onto the ground. Also, the tree form are older plants and Bob got significant production from them the first year.
* Lisianthus in many colors is grown, about 8,000 plants total. Bob has a neighboring greenhouse custom grow the plugs for him.
* Buddleia is a popular cut with florists despite its three- to four-day vase life. They use the long branches in big arrangements for events. Bob has grown many varieties and says the relatively new 'Potter's Purple' is the best.
* Prinopsis cliata, the sawleaf daisy, is a late-blooming yellow wildflower that is popular with florists and good in bouquets.

Bob got the seed from a Texas grower when he started his business and has been saving his own seed since.


With so many varieties, Bob has to stay organized. So every winter he creates a master plan that keeps him on schedule with buying seeds, ordering plants, starting plants, and all the other details involved in flower farming. "This is probably the most important tool on my farm, " Bob says of the plan, a sample of which is reprinted below. "I carry a hard copy with me all the time, make notes on it and read it weekly to remind me of what I'm supposed to do."

Having the affluent D.C. area for a market has pushed Bob's gross income per acre much higher than most places in the country. Whereas many growers average $25,000 per acre from cut flowers, Bob's gross is over $35,000 per acre. The florist customers, all top-of-the line shops, are willing to pay well for the new and unusual. Entertaining is a way of life in the nation's capital, so there's a strong market for flowers. He estimates that he sells 80% of everything he grows, up from about half in his early years.


He sells pre-made bouquets at the farmers' markets, but he's trying to get away from that and instead sell by the stem or by the bunch. He used to have three different sizes of bouquets, for $5, $8 and $12, but it got too confusing. Last year, he standardized the bouquet size at $10 and started making design or color variations in that size. He also makes up small bouquets with "leftovers" and short-stemmed varieties, which sell for $3. Some other varieties are sold either in grower's bunches or by the stem.


In his dealings with florists, Bob sends a fax every week but he hasn't found that effective because florists are so busy. So he just takes the flowers for them to see. "I fill my van to the brim and I sell it all," he says. And if he doesn't sell it all, he has an arrangement with his first florist, who will buy all the leftovers at $3 a bunch, up to $400, twice a week.


Bob advises other growers who want to sell to florists to take only the best quality to them, and don't take cheap, common flowers like bachelor buttons. Do grow unusual flowers, but remember that there's a limit to the amount of unusual items a florist can use. They'll buy a certain amount of unique flowers, such as Bleeding Heart, at whatever price you set, but "don't assume that because you drop the price when you have a lot that they're going to buy more," he says.

The flower production at Wollam Gardens is labor-intensive, and Bob has to find good help. He has four full-time and one part-time workers from the local area. He also has seasonal interns who come primarily to learn about the cut flower business by doing it. A few of his interns have moved on to start their own flower farms. The interns live in the five-bedroom farmhouse, now renovated. Bob is there only three nights a week. The rest of the time he lives in Washington, with Judy, who works for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and their 9-year-old son, Ben. Bob has worked out a schedule that allows him to equally share with Judy the job of taking and picking up Ben from school. That means he is often back and forth between city and farm, but he has arranged his marketing to allow him to bring flowers back to the city almost every time he comes.


Not much of the work is mechanized. Bob has a 34 hp Kubota tractor with a front-end loader for making compost and an old Farmall tractor for pulling wagons and mowing. He tills with a Troy-Bilt tiller outfitted with a furrower for raising the beds. He has a 21x48 greenhouse for starting his own transplants and a double-inflated hoophouse that he keeps heated to 42°F in winter, where he grows Temptress poppies, Lupine hartweggii, anemones and ranunculus in ground beds, where they bloom in March. He does a lot of season extension with plastic mulches, row cover and plastic on hoops. He set out stock this year on March 1, covered it with two layers of Remay and a plastic row cover. Although the temperature went down to 17°F in March, the plants were fine. Many of the perennial beds are mulched with landscape fabric, and the annuals are grown in white-on-black plastic mulch, which is laid taut with a mulch layer. Holes are made in the plastic with a painter's propane torch called a Benzomatic.

Asked about his goals for his farm, or plans for the future, Bob pauses for a long moment. "I would say I probably have done everything here without having a plan," he says. "My objective is to do this absolutely until physically or mentally I can't do it any longer. I hope I can do it till I'm 90. Seriously. I don't want to get bigger, I just want to get better."