Grasping the nettle: An interview with Caroline Beck
Words: Joanna Biggers
Photography: Esme Mai Photography
Last week, I spent a lunch-break chatting to Caroline Beck, a garden writer and flower grower based in Northern England. Caroline is the founder of Verde Flower Co, a mother and daughter business developed ‘from a knowledge that beautiful, scented and elegant flowers don’t need to be flown across the planet’ and can be grown without the use of damaging chemicals and excess packaging. For a number of years, they have rented a Victorian walled garden - a place they have breathed new life into, carefully nurtured and loved. Sadly, their tenancy unexpectedly ended in mid-December, forcing them to look for new land to rent and rebuild their business. While they do this, Caroline has launched DIRT, the diary of a gritty English flower grower on Substack.
Caroline told me, ‘our story is really common amongst people who rent land regardless of what they are growing.’ Since sharing the sad news about their tenancy online, Caroline has received a wave of support from other renters expressing their sympathy and understanding. Her daughter Roisin, who is a partner in the business and has recently been awarded a Nuffield Farming Scholarship, has experienced a similar outpouring of support from young farmers on TikTok who have shared experiences of losing their land. Caroline explained, ‘realistically our year has been completely torpedoed. We’ve got to find land, negotiate a rent and then we’ve got to get that land ready and move all our stock and that’s not just like moving house!’ She continued, ‘it takes a huge amount of labour because you’ve got to bed it in and then it’s still got to grow.’ As a consequence, it’s likely that her business won’t be able to get going again until March 2024. She went onto say, ‘if you’re going to take a hiatus out, then you still need a business to go back to.’ Writing DIRT is a way for Caroline to bring in an income until they can get back on their feet, as well as share thoughtful, long-form content.
One of the things she would like to explore in her writing is the reality of renting land. She openly described how difficult it is to get land - even for a grower like herself who has been in the flower growing industry for almost a decade and has built a wealth of contacts, along with a dedicated online audience. She said, ‘if you don’t come from a farming background and you don’t have all those contacts, it looks impossible to penetrate from the outside.’
I asked Caroline how she’d come up with the idea of DIRT and she explained that it had really came about out of necessity. She said, ‘they say necessity is the mother of invention and actually having no income is a hell of an incentive to do something.’ Caroline explained that she was a garden writer before she set up Verde Flower Co and that her drive to create a space on Substack came from a want to build a stronger community away from Instagram. She said, ‘I’m a great reader and I am really attracted to long-form and thinking pieces.’ Although Instagram is wonderful for networking, it can be hit and miss when it comes to engagement and ‘the grid can be a little limiting’. She reflected, 'Lots of people like reading without wanting to read a whole novel.’ Her instinct with DIRT is to do what she did as a radio producer and ensure that each piece has ‘a beginning, a middle and an end.’ Over the year, she hopes to have a catalogue of work that can be read as standalone pieces or as a collection, depending on the preference of the reader. She told me, ‘I never thought I’d enjoy the immediacy of writing so much but I do’ and commented on how much technology has influenced her working life over the years. When she produced programmes for BBC Radio 4, she would occasionally receive letters from listeners months after something had been recorded telling her how much they loved the show but nowadays, there’s a much more instant connection with readers.
This lead us neatly onto talking about community. Caroline said, ‘We had the most incredible support during the pandemic because obviously our business just fell off a cliff overnight, wedding after wedding got cancelled.’ But into that void, stepped an amazing amount of locals, who bought from Caroline over the garden gate. Caroline told me, ‘most of those people are now offering to help us move - Instagram really came into its own and kept us going.’ Since the pandemic, she thinks there has been a shift in people’s perceptions about supporting local and that we are about to enter ‘a golden age’ when it comes to consuming content. She said, ‘I’m not sure how long it will last but I think people are hungry for really thoughtful, high-quality, long-form writing.’
We finished our conversation by chatting about the health benefits of gardening and the positive effect of being outside. Caroline described watching something grow as ‘probably the most rewarding thing’ and wonderful for your mental health. Laughing, she said, ‘the fact that I’m looking to get an allotment after growing flowers professionally for the past 8 years shows that it’s a kind of need.’ She told me that it’s not just about growing food but about how the act of being outside makes us feel. It’s something that she believes is good for everybody and that is inherent in us all.
If you’re interested in supporting Caroline, you can subscribe to her Substack DIRT. A huge thank you to Caroline for being so generous with her time and to Esme, for letting me share these beautiful shots of Caroline and her daughter, Roisin.
