Manifesto: why I am starting Florilegio
Three mother plants (Philodendron Micans, Begonia Maculata, Pilea Moon Valley), a six-month plan, and the idea of a small nursery that documents everything. Break-even expected in month 6–10.
I am opening Florilegio with three mother plants: a Philodendron Micans, a Begonia Maculata and a Pilea Moon Valley. That is not manifesto understatement, it is literally three plants. That is where this starts.
The idea is simple and in some ways uneconomic: a small nursery that sells only what it actually grows, and that documents everything, including what goes wrong.
Why do it
When I started looking for rare plants I realised the problem was not finding them, it was trusting anyone. The care sheets on the websites are copied from one another, often badly translated from American sources with a climate that is not ours. The photographs are stock, and what arrives is a different plant. And when something dies nobody can tell you why, because nobody had ever grown it.
So here are the rules I set myself.
I sell only species I have kept. If a plant is in the catalogue it is because it is in the nursery, or it is coming from a supplier I know and goes through my own settling-in period before it ships.
I write the care sheets myself, with the values I actually use: light, humidity, temperature, substrate, rooting times measured. Where I do not have a figure, I write that I do not have it.
The photographs are of the plant you will receive, not of a perfect adult specimen photographed in Thailand.
I document the failures too. If a batch of cuttings fails to take, the piece on that species says so.
The six-month plan, in the open
Months one and two: build the nursery and get the mother plants producing. Months three and four: first rooted cuttings, catalogue open with a handful of species. Months five and six: expand to fifteen or so species, start shipping regularly, work out which plants have real demand. I expect to break even somewhere between month six and month ten, with a wide margin because a single infestation or a bad summer can move everything by two months.
What I will not do
I will not take pre-orders on plants that do not exist yet. I will not sell freshly cut cuttings as though they were rooted. And I will not compromise on the fact that a living plant is a living thing and not an object: if it reaches you in poor shape I want to know, and I want to put it right, not argue about it.
A small nursery has exactly one real competitive advantage, which is that whoever works there knows every plant individually. The moment it grows too big for that, the advantage disappears. Which is why I have no intention of growing fast.
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