SWEET PEAS & SWEET HOMES: WHERE FLOWERS BECOME MEMORIES
To welcome October, this week on Cultivating Place, host Ben Futa is in conversation with Colleen Raney of Washington State’s Songbird Seed Company and Diadem Flower Company.
Colleen is the founder of Songbird Seed Co., a seed company devoted to the cultivation and preservation of exceptional sweet peas. What started as a personal fascination with the sweet pea, became a deeper study of their history, varieties, cultivation, and extraordinary diversity. Today, Colleen grows hundreds of sweet pea varieties each year, selecting and sharing seeds that she finds particularly beautiful, unusual, and worthy of being grown again. Songbird is having a Fall sale that begins on Saturday, October 3rd.
Her work is grounded in the belief that sweet peas need not be complicated, and there is so much to be discovered in paying attention. Colleen publishes a bi-annual periodical, The Sweet Pea: A Garden Companion. She is the founder of the American Sweet Pea Society.
Together, Ben and Colleen explore her early life in acting and singing, and the connection between scent, memory, and our sense of home. We follow Colleen’s growth from tending a simple garden and growing flowers for pollinators into a full-fledged flower farm, with a particular focus on her success growing sweet peas. They also talk about stepping back, paying attention, and letting the plants tell us what they need.
At the beginning of the season for sowing many spring bloomers, we hope you join us and listen in!
From Ben: This week I’m honored to welcome Colleen Raney, the founder of Songbird Seed Company and Diadem Flower Company in Skagit Valley, Washington.
Colleen’s path to flower farming has taken her from an early life in Seattle
to New York, where she studied fine arts, and then to Portland, Maine,
where growing a few tomatoes eventually grew into a ten-acre flower farm.
From Maine, Colleen and her husband eventually made their way back to
the Pacific Northwest, where she now farms two and a half acres in the
Skagit Valley.
In our conversation today, we talk about the many forms a life can take, and the unexpected ways that plants can help us find our way home. We talk about the particular magic of sweet peas, the way scent can hold a memory, and how a mock orange (Philadelphus sp.) blooming in Colleen’s childhood yard became something she carries with her wherever she goes. We also talk about farming as production, the difference between gardening and growing, and what happens when we step back, do a little less, and pay closer attention to what the plants are telling us.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Colleen’s idea that home isn’t a place, but a point on a timeline. Maybe that’s part of what plants give us: a way to return to something we remember, even as everything around us changes.
Enjoy!
Follow Colleen online:
and on Instagram:
All photos courtesy of Colleen Raney, Songbird Seed Company; all rights reserved.
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JOIN US again next week: Regenerative Gardening, growing, and Agriculture is a theme in our world right now, and for good reason. But it’s complicated. Next week Cultivating Place will be joined by CSU Chico soil scientist, Dr. Garrett Liles, a cofounder of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture & Resilient Systems - to learn more. Join us! That's right here, next week. Listen in!
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Thinking out loud this week...
Hey, it's Ben—
I hope this conversation leaves you thinking about the many ways plants
can connect us to a sense of home. For Colleen, sometimes that connection is as simple and powerful as the scent of a mock orange, bringing back a memory of the place where she grew up. Home, as she puts it, isn’t necessarily a place. It’s a point on a timeline.
And maybe there’s something else here for all of us who garden. Plants don’t always need more from us. Sometimes they need us to get out of the way, to do less, and to listen more. High touch does not have to mean high maintenance. Production does not necessarily equal gardening. And sometimes, the best thing we can do is simply pay attention to what’s
happening in front of us.
I hope Colleen’s story encourages you to follow your curiosity, embrace the
things you’re terrible at, and maybe even get a little better at being terrible.
Because that’s often where the learning begins.
Of the many lessons we learn in the soil and from spending time in
collaborative relationships with so many different plants, the reminder that they remind us we’re connected while helping us to connect, feels like a good lesson to remember in this moment.
Colleen and I first connected via Instagram - an example of the algorithm
working for the better. I lurked in her stories for months before finally reaching out with an invitation to a virtual coffee date: my only pretext and preface was, “Hey, I really like what you’re doing and would love to learn more about you and your work.”
From one business owner to another, I know how difficult an ask that can sometimes be, especially when we’re in the peak of a busy season. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised when she responded back almost immediately; “Sure, I’d love to, let’s find a time.”
Our original Zoom meeting was scheduled for an hour, and we ended up spilling into two before we each took a big sigh and relented to return to our endless to-do lists and business tasks that we set aside for those few precious minutes to make a new connection.
We’ve been text and voice memo buddies ever since, and I can’t tell you how
glad I am to know her today. We often exchange long-form voice messages,
everything from business advice and troubleshooting to “Hey, life is heavy
right now, how are you doing? Hope you’re well.”
I think it bears repeating, especially now, that these actions and conversations
and connections and community-building are just as much about cultivating
place well as growing any plant or sowing any seed.
Do less, better. Three incredibly powerful words, especially for those of us who enjoy creating and building. In our now five + years owning and operating a business, this is wisdom I wish I’d had from the beginning.
If you know me well, you know I abhor the adjective of “small” business - I much prefer to identify as local and independent, brick and mortar. Because, after all, that’s what Botany & Co is at the end of the day.
That said, the ethos of do less, better is, essentially, about choosing to operate
at a small scale - intentionally. To focus on becoming a master of our trade or
craft, to get curious about every little detail and every little nuance, because
as we come to find - none of them are little, and all of them add up over
time.
It is possible, as both Colleen and Botany & Co. demonstrate, along with so many other local and independent businesses, to have a small footprint, a small team, small land - and still have a big impact. This is what I choose to focus on in our work, and how Colleen chooses to show up when it comes to Sweet Peas.
There is power in mastery, and after a career feeling like a generalist, I’m actually quite enjoying the clarity that comes when doing less, better. The noise fades, the calm returns, my nervous system takes a breath again - all good things, and all things that spending time in the garden reminds me of on a regular basis.
In this spirit, Jennifer and I are once again gearing up for another 100 Days in Place project, which will kick off October 31. More details will be coming soon, and if anything I’ve shared here today has made your ears perk, you’ll want to keep this special creative community-building endeavor on your radar as we head into the holiday and winter seasons.
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