Main Street Business

Frances Grace came in from the fields and sat down to talk over her kitchen table at Sweet Flower Farm in Copake one weekday afternoon. Her four-year-old son, Percy, played nearby with a spider he had made out of an egg carton and purple pipe cleaners. Her husband offered us some cookies from Camphill. Frances and her husband, Thaddeus, purchased this farm just over a year ago and moved from Denver in June 2023. I wanted to hear about their new venture for a high-end florist and Chinese acupuncturist far from the Rocky Mountains.

Why did you name this place Sweet Flower Farm?

It came naturally because it’s a very sweet place, but also, the farmhouse was built by the Sweet family in 1830, so it was a no-brainer. They were Dutch settlers and owned a lot of land in Copake. The ceilings are high for an eyebrow colonial farmhouse because the Dutch are generally quite tall. The farm was previously called the Farm on Center Hill but that was practically the same name as the farm next door and a source of constant confusion. 

What made you come here?

Long story but I jokingly (and kind of legitimately) tell people that Instagram brought us here. I followed an intuitive draw to the Hudson Valley as the perfect place for this next chapter of my life. I grew up on the East Coast and was eager to leave it as a late teen who was very drawn to the alternative lifestyle out West – hippies, skiing, yoga, the big mountains etc. – but am loving being back in this familiar territory now.

After Colorado College and a few years of traveling and teaching yoga, I got married and started working in the world of flowers and events. I started my own company called Prema, which focused primarily on floral design for weddings. I worked all over the Rocky Mountains, but the majority of my weddings were in Aspen. 

Weddings are a very hands-on and high-stress business, especially in the luxury realm. I worked with many wonderful women and had a great team to help me, but I burnt out pretty hard after seven years of running my company. We survived mud slides, snowstorms, hail, and bridezillas and made miracles happen at high altitude for clients who expected the world!

In the winters, when wedding work was slow, I often worked as a prop stylist on photo shoots and enjoyed doing interior styling work as well. With the start of COVID, the event world came to a shrieking halt and shut down all work for me for over a year (and for my husband also, as he had to close his Traditional Chinese Medicine clinic for many months). Simultaneously, in the spring of 2020, our son was born, and that changed everything for us. Right after Percy was born, my wonderful father (who encouraged all his children to be entrepreneurs) died unexpectedly. That year was a portal of life and death, joy and grief. It put a lot of things into perspective to say the least. 

I knew I needed to make some changes with how I was using my energy. I craved a deep connection to nature, a more supportive community, and a calmer setting (all of which I have found here in the Hudson Valley). I finished out the wedding season of 2021, which was packed with postponed weddings, and decided to close my business, sell my inventory, and take some time completely off from work. I wanted to focus on being a mother and being more intentional on crafting the life I wanted to give to my child. I wanted to travel and spend meaningful time with my family.

At this point, we took six months to enjoy living in the countryside in England. Thaddeus was working on a book, and I was reveling in the intensity and fun of spending all my hours with a newly walking/talking child. It was glorious. I visited countless stately homes and gardens, walked in meadows, and just loved being in deciduous forests again (they felt like home – I never connected with the trees in Colorado!). My mother was a brilliant landscape designer who instilled a love of gardening, plants, and flowers and gave me my own corner of the garden from an early age. Because of her, visiting gardens is one of my favorite things to do when traveling. It’s such a powerful way to understand a place.  I’ve always connected with plants. They speak to me on a core level. I have to spend time outside every day to feel grounded and happy, and I knew that I wanted to offer my son the opportunity to grow up connected to nature in all its wildness and beauty the way I did. 

After coming to terms with the fact that staying in the UK forever wasn’t going to happen, I started looking more seriously at real estate in the Hudson Valley on Instagram and Zillow. It had been on my radar for quite some time and after homing in on our list of priorities for a place to live, this seemed to have exactly what we were looking for. The bucolic Eastern area of the Taconics in Columbia and Dutchess County was most appealing to me because of the rolling hills (this topography reminds me a lot of Charlottesville, VA, where I lived for many of my formative years) – it seemed like the closest to living in Great Britain with its sense of history, interesting and eclectic people, and the slower pace of life. 

We finally stopped just looking online and actually came in March of 2022 to visit seven houses in three days with Annabel Taylor of Sotheby’s. This was the last house we saw, and Annabel insisted we see it even though the Iisting photos looked terrible – they were basically just pictures of peaches, eggs, and animals rather than the actual house and land. The massive plantings of perennials barely registered to me upon viewing the property. It was still wintery and bare, but I was instantly charmed by the special energy of the property. 

What are your plans for this new venture?

It’s a work in progress! I’m still getting to know the land and learn what it has to offer. I sell cut flowers directly to a group of local florists and to a large wholesale market in Ghent. We have four acres of perennials (and berries and an amazing fruit orchard!) that were planted five years ago by the previous owners including 3,000 peonies, countless lace cap and limelight hydrangeas, and many rows of other shrubs and flowers such as astilbe, Japanese anemone, echinacea, and yarrow. At this point it is more than enough to qualify the farm for an agricultural exemption on the property and make it financially sustainable while definitely not profitable if I’m honest. And I’m experimenting with ways to share this bounty of flowers with the community in a broader way – it’s not about making money but sharing the beauty.

For example, I recently donated the majority of the flowers needed to decorate a beautiful sailcloth tent for the annual North East Community Center’s Chef and Farmer’s Brunch and shared my time and skills with some wonderful volunteers to design the pieces. It was such fun and I look forward to doing more events like this in the future. I have already connected with two other non-profits in Hudson to help them this fall. 

I love inviting families to come to the farm and cut flowers. I take weekly bouquets to my Pilates class and drop off flowers at favorite shops around town. Friends have dug up hydrangeas and transplanted them in their own gardens. It’s such a joy to share flowers. It’s truly healing – it makes you feel good and connected to the earth. We have no intention of making this an event “venue,” but we hope to host more community gatherings, farm dinners, and classes on the farm. This farm has a very open energy that is meant to be shared with others, and it is my long-term intention to see how we can grow our impact here and create more opportunities to foster this supportive and loving community. •

To learn more, you can reach Frances Grace via email at francespgrace@gmail.com.