An interview with Jenny Poelman
As soon as you round the corner and walk down the hill of Jenny Poelman’s property, you feel a deep exhale.
An expansive property with beautiful, colour-filled gardens and a green house built for dreaming, you can’t help but feel inspired.
Her sweet greenhouse sits at the edge of her garden, surrounded by flowers, salvaged windows, a work table and everything she needs to make something beautiful.
“I just love that when I open the door, I feel peace,” she says.
What began as a winter project has become the heart of a small but growing flower business that Jenny never really set out to create.
Jenny is a nurse, a mother, a gardener, a flower grower and the person behind a seasonal flower business that has grown almost accidentally over the past several years.
What began with a few rows of flowers in a vegetable garden has evolved into bouquets, subscriptions, workshops and, more recently, weddings.
The business has grown, but never according to a rigid plan. It has simply followed the garden.
A space built through dreaming
The greenhouse took shape over a winter, which Jenny describes as her “dreaming and scheming” season.
There were hours spent looking on Pinterest and Instagram, thinking through the details. The windows came first, found on Facebook Marketplace, and the rest of the structure was designed around them.
Her husband, Terry, handled the construction and calculations, with help from family and friends, while Jenny supplied the sketches and vision.
It was pieced together slowly and thoughtfully, much like the garden itself.
Jenny doesn’t use it as a traditional greenhouse for starting seedlings. Instead, it is a workshop, a place to assemble bouquets, a backup when the weather turns, and sometimes even a play space for her kids.
Flower stems and leaves land on the floor. When the work is done, Jenny sweeps everything out onto the grass. There is something freeing about a creative space that allows you to be messy.
Letting the garden lead
The business started quietly. When Jenny and her family moved to their current home, much of the garden was overgrown. She began editing, planting and reworking the space. Her original plan was mostly vegetables, with one row dedicated to cut flowers.
Inspired by having a cutting garden of her own, she planted the flowers, and was hooked.
In 2020, Jenny began selling bouquets from home, initially offering porch pickups. There was no grand business plan but each year, the idea grew a little.
Four years ago, she and her friend Bre began hosting workshops. The greenhouse made it possible to stretch the season, from spring seed-starting workshops into November wreath-making and ornament workshops. Subscriptions followed and then came weddings.
A friend asked Jenny to provide the flowers, and her first reaction was that it seemed too big and too scary. But the right kind of wedding for Jenny's flowers is also the kind that makes sense for the way she grows: seasonal, local and connected to the person growing them.
The business has continued to grow.
Making space for creativity
The greenhouse is a creative space, but it is also a reminder that creativity doesn't always mean being in control.
Growing flowers requires planning, but it also requires surrender.
Jenny has learned what thrives in her particular microclimate and what doesn't. She works with what is seasonal rather than trying to force flowers to grow at the wrong time.
Sometimes a crop isn't ready. Sometimes the weather changes the plan and sometimes the garden surprises you.
There is a certain peace in accepting that some things aren't in your control.
Jenny loves the rhythm of the seasons. Eventually the dahlias have their final moment, frost arrives, and the garden gets cleaned up. Then she rests.
Winter becomes another part of the creative process: a time for dreaming, planning and looking forward to the next season.
“I just love the rhythms of this specific type of creativity,” she says.
A place to make without getting it perfect
One of the most important things about the greenhouse is that everything Jenny needs is already there.
Her snips. Her buckets. Her flowers. Her dried arrangements collected from gardens and local farms. The organization itself helps her create.
When she assembles bouquets in the kitchen, even if the work is technically the same, it doesn't feel the same. The greenhouse tells her that this is where she gets to make things.
“This space is specifically for me to be creative,” she says.
Creative spaces don't necessarily need to be elaborate. Sometimes they are a corner of a home, a kitchen table, a garden shed or, in Jenny's case, a little green building at the edge of the garden.
What matters is that the space gives you permission to enter a different mode.
The joy of sharing what you grow
Perhaps the most beautiful part of Jenny's work is that the creativity doesn't end when she leaves the greenhouse.
A bouquet ends up on someone's kitchen table. A workshop brings people into the garden who have never cut their own flowers before. A subscription arrives each month with whatever happens to be growing at that moment.
Jenny talks about flowers almost casually. At the end of the day, she says, they're just flowers. But she also knows what happens when you bring them inside.
Even seeing a bouquet on her own table brings her joy. And that's what she gets to share with other people.
Her workshops carry the same philosophy. People arrive saying they've never done anything like this before. They worry about getting it right.
But you really can't go wrong with flowers. If a flower head pops off, you cut another one. If something doesn't work, you try again.
The stakes are low.The point is simply to make something together.
It isn't a space where everything has to be perfect. It's a space where things are allowed to grow, change, surprise you and eventually come to an end.
Then you clean it up, close the door, and start dreaming about what comes next.