Sarah Head moves a lot of flowers. The Eda Creek owner, a former high school social studies teacher, grows about 100,000 stems per year at her property in Oregon City. Most of these she sells wholesale, at the membership-only Portland Flower Market on Swan Island. Others go into the weekly arrangements she does for Canard’s Oregon City location. And some fill her CSA bouquets, which she’s offered since 2020. As a farmer who grows for florists, Head likes to include plants that don’t ship well—in other words, stuff you’re unlikely to see in a grocery bouquet. Take Nicotiana: The flowering tobacco has lovely star-shaped blossoms, but it’s fragile and sticky and “just gets trashed” in shipping, Head says. Or Agrostemma, a pretty but easily bruised cottage garden flower.

Head splits the season into three six-week stretches. (Sign up for the full 18 weeks to snag the best deal, about $27 per bouquet.) Spring bouquets begin in early to mid-April: lavishly petaled ranunculus, peonies, poppies, sweet peas. As the weather warms, foxgloves, dahlias, zinnias, cosmos, and strawflowers arrive. The summertime star of the show is Lisianthus, or prairie gentian, which is dramatic and roselike, with an exceptionally long vase life.

When it comes to arranging, Head likes asymmetry, negative space—she’s done art throughout her life. “Color theory and movement and blocking, all that stuff that’s in any kind of art, is in floral design,” she says. And since an epic aphid infestation (“so gross, so gross,” she recalls), she’s become interested in beneficial insects for pest management. She’s been using a spray containing predatory nematodes, which are microscopic roundworms that infect their host with lethal bacteria. “An aphid taken out by a nematode looks like it just splatted into a window,” says Head. “There’s nothing but legs left.”

Marianné Copene has been in the flower business for nearly 20 years. She’s grown on farms, on leased land, in backyards, in disused lots. She’s sold wholesale, at farmers markets, at pop-ups. These days, she grows on a few patches near her home in the Piedmont neighborhood and in a high tunnel in Cully. She’s offered a CSA in some form since 2015 (the name of her business, Corolla, refers to the whorl of petals that surrounds a flower’s sexual organs), and after a yearlong hiatus, it’s back. A five-week spring share begins in early April and features fluffy ranunculus, daffodils, and tulips. Later-season shares are still in the works.

Copene, who also works as a large-scale installation artist, approaches arranging from the perspective of a sculptor. “I get to grow my own medium,” she says, and she provides herself a bounty: dome-shaped didiscus; dainty orlaya; spiky hyacinth and delphinium; cute and freckled martagon lilies. Working at the farmers market, she used to play a game where she’d build bouquets inspired by people she spotted in the crowd. “I would see somebody and appreciate their style, or just how they were walking,” she says. “Then I would make a bouquet with them in mind.” Not infrequently, she says, her muse would arrive at the stand, wishing to purchase that very arrangement.

Copene’s newest project, in partnership with the nonprofit P:ear, is a job training program in flower farming and floral service for unhoused youth. Three garden plots in Old Town have been secured, and Copene has been growing starts that will soon enter the soil. Expect those bouquets by July.

Stiner Banuelos goes after what she wants. For seven years, she owned local vegan cheese company Vtopian. Then, in 2023, “I just didn’t want to make cheese anymore,” she says. “I decided I wanted to grow flowers.” So she sold the business and found a job at a vegetable farm in Canby (called, confusingly, Empowered Flowers), where the owners encouraged her to grow what she wanted. She soon launched Flowers Now, Cry Later, and she currently tends to 22 six-foot beds filled with blooms.

Now in her second season, Banuelos is offering a 10-week summer CSA starting in early July and an eight-week fall CSA starting in mid-September. Subscribers can receive their bouquets wrapped in paper or, for $10 more each week, in a vase specially made by Banuelos’s potter partner, Justin Caraco. The vases, nearly as colorful and shapely as the bouquets they hold, are loans—they get returned each week. Banuelos takes an intuitive approach to arranging, sometimes inspired by the vase itself, sometimes by a notable plant—such as a bright green amaranth that Banuelos says “grew like balls” last season, which she paired with pale pink snapdragons, cosmos in white and various pinks, and lime-colored millet.

Banuelos’s favorite color is pink, but she grows the full rainbow: zinnias in yellow and coral and green, cosmos so red they’re almost brown, a member of the amaranth family called celosia that comes in a whole spectrum of bright colors and several eye-catching shapes (feathery plume, coral-like bloom). Plus? Lots and lots of vibrant orange marigolds for Día de los Muertos. Banuelos, who is Mexican American, grew hundreds for last year’s holiday, but she still sold so many she barely had any left for herself. All appear in the CSA, which Banuelos sets out to make accessible with several payment options..

On their first date, in January 2020, Aaron Kerr mentioned to Madeline Tucker an interest in WWOOF, the program that places volunteers on organic farms as part of a live/work exchange. It was little more than a vague dream; Kerr at the time was doing tech work for an insurance company. Six months later, pandemic swirling, the recent college grads had quit their jobs (Tucker had been at an environmental nonprofit) and were growing veggies on a farm in Humboldt County. By 2021, after a series of WWOOF stops in California and Washington, they landed in Portland. They started Walking Whale in 2024.

Tucker, who studied sustainable agriculture in college and was involved with urban farming projects in Berkeley, says she once spurned flowers. “I thought they were silly and frivolous and a waste of resources,” she says. Then she began growing flowers in her backyard, began watching them attract swarms of pollinators—and began noticing their beauty, temporary as it was. Now she’s quick to cite studies that show how cut flowers can improve mood and reduce stress.

As part of the Headwaters Farm Incubator, a program that provides affordable land and support to upstart farm businesses, Tucker and Kerr grow on just under a half-acre in Gresham. This will be their third season at the PSU farmers market and selling wholesale, but their first with a CSA. A five-week spring share begins in mid-May, followed by summer and late-summer shares (six weeks each) and a four-week fall share. Expect many of the usual suspects: ranunculus, snapdragons, poppies, sweet peas, zinnias, dahlias, cosmos. Tucker and Kerr also prioritize textural interest—think unusual grasses and seed pods—and flowers that dry well. When it comes to bouquets (Kerr does most of the design work and arranging), Tucker says the goal is “whimsical cottage garden.”