Seasonal flowers, from the field to your table
Wildstem is a florist in a Hackney railway arch, buying British-grown flowers direct from small farms and delivering them across London the same day.
Hattie Lowe grew up on her parents’ cut-flower farm near Faversham and spent her twenties arranging imported roses for hotel lobbies. In 2017 she and her friend Sol Adebayo, a former chef, started selling the farm’s surplus on a Sunday stall on Columbia Road. The idea was simple: flowers that looked like the season they were grown in, sold by people who knew the growers by name.
Today Wildstem buys from eleven British farms - dahlias and roses from Kent, narcissi from Cornwall, sweet peas from Sussex, tulips from Lincolnshire - and pays every grower the week before the flowers are cut, so they can plan their beds around us. From March to November more than nine in ten of our stems are British; in the leanest winter weeks we top up from Dutch and Italian growers we have visited and name them on the care card.
Every bouquet is hand-tied in the arch on Mare Street and wrapped in compostable paper. There is no plastic in our boxes and we have never used floral foam, which is a microplastic that cannot be recycled. Our London deliveries go out by cargo bike and electric van, and our leftover stems go to Hackney care homes on Saturday afternoons.
- British growers we buy from direct
- 11British growers we buy from direct
- Of 2025 stems grown in Britain
- 84%Of 2025 stems grown in Britain
- Plastic or floral foam used
- 0 gPlastic or floral foam used
A short history
2017
A stall on Columbia Road
Hattie and Sol sell buckets of stems from one Kent cutting garden every Sunday morning. They sell out by eleven.
2019
The railway arch
Wildstem moves into an arch on Mare Street with a cold room, a workbench and the first two cargo bikes.
2022
The Weekly Stem
The flower subscription launches with 60 subscribers; by the following spring it is the shop’s busiest morning.
2026
Eleven growers, no foam
The grower network reaches eleven farms and 84% of the year’s stems are British-grown.
What we hold to
British-grown first
From March to November every stem we can buy in Britain, we do - from eleven small farms across Kent, Sussex, Cornwall and Lincolnshire.
Plastic-free, foam-free
Compostable paper, cornstarch water pouches and paper-string ties. We have never used floral foam and never will.
A care card in every box
Written for that week’s stems, so you know which ones to re-cut, which to dry and how long each will last.
What customers say
“I have had the Weekly Stem for two years and I still open the box like it is a birthday. The dahlias last October lasted twelve days.”
“Sent The Hackney to my mum in Walthamstow at 11am and she rang me at three to say it had arrived. Not a scrap of plastic in the box.”
“Our wedding flowers were every bit as wild as we hoped - they even pressed the leftover stems for us afterwards.”
What’s coming into season, once a fortnight
A short letter from the workshop: what the growers are cutting, the stems to look out for, a care tip that will make your flowers last longer, and first pick of the Christmas wreaths. No spam, ever.