farmer-florist
Lyndsey Boekenkamp is a flower farmer and floral designer living and working in Orlando, FL. She grew up in her mother's garden, and has loved growing gardens and working with flowers ever since. She feels strongly that locally grown American flowers have an important role in the organic farming conversation and are the key to the most beautiful design work. As a result, Lyndsey is passionate about providing organic flowers, sustainable design services and educational opportunities in her community.
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Lyndsey has lived and nurtured flowers in many different parts of the country, including New Jersey, Texas, Florida, Massachusetts, New York City, and Connecticut. During her time in the New York City area, she operated a micro farm which provided enough flowers to offer a flower CSA in her community, served as a horticulturist at a historic home and garden in Maplewood, NJ and volunteered her time at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden teaching families about the joys of plants. She also held many private individual and corporate clients for whom she regularly provided floral design services. Through it all Florida has always been home and she is proud to be part of the flower farming community in her beloved Sunshine State.
Lyndsey has more than a decade of farming and floral design experience and earned her certificate in horticulture from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. She is a graduate of the Floret Workshop and proud member of the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers.
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Beyond the flowers, Lyndsey has a Master of Arts degree from New York University in Arts Administration and works at a major non-profit cancer center raising funds for cancer research, her other passion. She lives with her husband Scotty and yellow lab Mighty (aka, lead flower boy and chief bucket inspector) in College Park, Orlando.
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Learn more about Secret Garden Guru's services here.
the urban farm
Secret Garden Guru is an urban flower farm located in College Park, Orlando. The farm itself is comprised of three private farm plots, each set up on less than a tenth of an acre of land. The primary growing seasons are spring and fall, celebrating a wide variety of annual flowers. The farm produces thousands of stems per season from seed to bloom, with priority use going toward sustainable floral design for weddings and seasonal flower CSA subscriptions.
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The inspiration for the name Secret Garden Guru came from the classic children's story The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, a long-time favorite of the farm's founder Lyndsey. In the novel, the main character Mary cultivates a hidden garden, bringing it back to life. The notion of seeing something where there was once nothing has always resonated with Lyndsey and became the ethos behind starting the farm and much of her educational work within her community. After all, to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.
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As FHB writes - "...if you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden." We hope our locally farmed flowers and farm offerings help you see it too.
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