THE FULL STORY
Burghblooms began with a simple, joyful experience: cutting flowers at a local u-pick farm for my daughter’s first birthday party. That moment sparked something that hasn’t let go: a desire to build a more consistent, meaningful relationship with flowers, the land, and the cycles of growing.
​
We began transforming the vacant lots next door to our house in 2020. The space was overgrown with invasive plants that had crowded out diversity. Bit by bit, season by season, we’ve been working to convert it into a thriving micro flower farm, planting annuals, perennials, native species, and flowering trees and bushes that support not just our work, but pollinators, birds, and people too.
​
Burghblooms is about more than flowers. It’s about building connections: with neighbors, with nature, and with the sometimes uncomfortable truths about race, land ownership, and privilege in Pittsburgh. Larimer is a historically Black neighborhood. Our family is white, and we benefit from systems that have long excluded Black people and people of color from home and land ownership. We want to name that plainly. Burghblooms donates a portion of our monthly profits to local organizations that support Black Pittsburghers and people of color.
​​
We’re also mindful that we farm on land that was once home to Indigenous people, including the Osage (Wazhazhe), who were forcibly displaced. Acknowledging this history is part of our responsibility.
​​
Burghblooms is still growing (literally and figuratively) but our hope is that it can be a place where flowers, connection, and justice take root together.