Hiya, I thought I'd start my first blog post off by just introducing myself and our business so you can get a sense of who we are and what we are all about.
I’m Emily, and together with my mum, Jo (and dad, Owen), I run a flower farm located in Nelson, New Zealand. We have been growing flowers in my family for as long as I can remember, but really since the early 2000’s (I’m a mid-90’s baby, so my pre-2000’s memories are very limited, haha). It all started in West Otago on the original McCall family farm, as a way to diversify income on what was, at the time, a pretty traditional sheep and beef farm. Now we grow them here in Upper Moutere, Nelson. The story of how that came to be is a story for another time.
Over the last few years, we have grown our business from just cut flowers to include an artisan skincare range, soaps, clay masks, micellar water - all based around the goodness of peonies. We have also started experimenting with some other crops (like the Saffron!) in the off season, because we needed something else to do!
This is actually my favourite thing to do - work on and develop new products and come up with new and interesting ways to use peonies. There are two main clusters of compounds found in peony flowers that are particularly interesting to me - first is around skin care, and the second is a bit more out there. The skin care benefits of peonies are fairly well known, but this was completely new to me.
When we got our hydrosol tested, it came back with a group of 5 or 6 compounds that interact with your olfactory system (a fancy science way to say smell) to increase dopamine and serotonin production in the brain. Isn't that cool? And also a bit weird I thought, but following some more thinking and research, I found that these compounds are actually found in a whole lot of different flowers and they are the reason behind why flowers make us happy. This is something I've known for a while now, but I love knowing the neurological and biochemical reason behind this effect. Isn’t it cool?!
If you couldn't tell already, I’m a bit of a nerd (and proud of it) and the science behind a lot of these processes is incredibly interesting to me. This is doubly true for anything related to psychology or neuroscience as this is what I studied at university - absolutely nothing to do with flower farming (or so I thought, haha). Skills that I cultivated and learned at uni have been more useful than I originally thought - my curiosity and research skills being the most obvious. I’ve always loved to read, and I love the challenge of collecting all the pieces of information and putting them together to get the complete picture along with all the individual details. These have been so useful when it comes to recipe formulation and testing for our products, especially when we are in the early phases of development.
This has got a little away from me, so I’m going to stop here and leave the rest for another post. Hope you enjoyed my little tangent and are prepared for more in future blogs.
Until next time (: