Meet Hillary

Once upon a time in Washington DC, I sat at a desk and met deadlines and went to meetings and often dreamed of doing something else. When I got married in 2015, I thought it would be fun to do my own flowers. It was, though I don’t recommend it, if you’d like to get a good night’s sleep before your wedding!

My new-found passion for flowering clicked with a simmering interest in farming, and in 2016, I started a 10-week internship at Wollam Gardens, a flower farm and wedding venue in rural Virginia. Ten weeks became a year became five, and I became the farm’s general manager in 2019.

During that time, I learned how to grow, harvest, sell, and arrange flowers. I built relationships with other growers and florists in Maryland, Washington DC, and Virginia, and I led Wollam Gardens’ custom floral design department from 2017 to 2021, flowering at least a hundred weddings both on the farm and off.

In 2022, I started Ferdinand Loves Flowers.  Who is Ferdinand? The Story of Ferdinand the Bull was a childhood favorite. Something about my years on the farm made it resonate once again…the story of a bull raised to fight who really just wanted to sit and smell the flowers felt like a parallel to my journey from the city to the farm. And in my newest incarnation as a florist, I can’t help but treasure the seasonal, locally-grown blooms and all the native flora of the mid-Atlantic that are so familiar to me now. I like to call myself a Locaflor. If you’re a Spanish-speaker like Ferdinand, you could say it means you’re crazy for flowers!

Ferdinand’s story also reminds us to take pleasure in flowers…yes, even in the chaos of planning a wedding, you can stop and smell the flowers. My goal is to help you do that.