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36 Feature April | 2023 Founded in 2002, LynnVale Studios is dedicated to cultivating creativity through floriculture and fine art. is beautiful and bucolic 10-acre Certified American Grown flower farm, flower design studio, and fine-art and design studio is owned and operated by two artists, a husband-and-wife team, Andrea and Lou Gagnon. It is located in Gainesville, Va., a community of some 17,000 residents approximately 35 miles west-southwest of Washington, D.C. Andrea brings her love of floral design and floriculture while Lou, a former architect and urban planner and current working artist and art teacher, explores the inspiration of fine art. LynnVale Studios sells its locally grown flowers to the public at a farmers market in the nation's capital and offers weekly home delivery of bouquets to customers in select areas throughout D.C., Maryland and Virginia. e company also designs arrangements for special events, specializing in ecofriendly weddings. In addition, LynnVale sells wholesale to florists around the D.C. metro area. I spoke with Andrea Gagnon, who combines her professional design education and floriculture experience to grow premium flowers and offer distinctive floral arrangements. Here we get a glimpse of her life as a farmer-florist. THE LIFE OF A Farmer- Florist By Nita Robertson, AIFD, CFD Andrea Gagnon LynnVale Studios Gainesville, Va. FR: Tell us about the history of your farm and how you started. AG: I was raised in the suburbs, a child of parents who had both either lived on farms or actively farmed in their youth. I grew up with a passion for design, gardening and place-making, which led me to study architecture at Virginia Tech, where I met my husband, Lou. We headed west to begin our careers as designers in Oregon and then California. We returned to the East Coast after 10 years, to see our young family grow and thrive on the family farm where generations had worked and played together. From the moment I harvested my first cockscomb bloom, which I had started from seed, I was hooked. We started small, with a steep horticultural learning curve to surmount, but our farm has grown exponentially over the years yet still remains a "boutique" flower farm specializing in unusual and uncommonly beautiful blooms and foliages. I credit my education and experience as a designer with helping me become a more profitable grower. FR: What makes your farm special? AG: Our farm has been in my husband's family for eight generations, and we are proud to keep the farm in agricultural use, with the land open and productive. We are located about 45 minutes west of D.C., so we benefit from close proximity to many of our retail and wholesale customers. Very often, our flowers are harvested in the morning and delivered that afternoon. FR: What does being a "Certified American Grown" farm mean? AG: At its most basic, it means that we offer our customers a guarantee that the flowers that we label as Certified American Grown are grown on our farm or on one of our feeder farms. It means that we support and advocate for U.S. growers nationwide

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