The Red Gate Nursery

Shortcuts

• Address
• Telephone
• Alerts
• Contact The Business
• Claim ownership or report listing

• 

  Want your business to be the top-listed Home Improvement Business in Armuchee?

The Red Gate Nursery

Stolen Flowers Farm, where The Red Gate Nursery is located, began as a small cut flower farm in 2011. My daughter, Jesse, and I grew specialty cut flowers for weddings, wholesalers, Whole Foods Market, and the Chattanooga Market. When Jesse married and set about growing her own family in Chattanooga, I had to find a way to continue flower farming – my retirement career - without her good help, and in a way that would be sustainable as a one-woman business.

My original plan was to sell potted perennials and shrubs here at the farm. I began to shop for seeds, make lists, and design my own borders and beds to showcase the flowers. With every new issue of Fine Gardening magazine my seed list grew longer, but I was not excited by any of it. I should’ve been chomping at the bit to get seeds started, and rows ready, and beds and borders planted, but I didn’t like the flowers in the magazines, I didn’t want these flowers in my own gardens. Something was not quite right in my head, I was bored with flowers, my lifelong first love.

One day a seed catalog came in the mail and in it was an essay about the dwindling population of Monarch butterflies. This article was the very inspiration I needed! I threw away my lists of all the nice, trendy, hybridized flowers I’d been planning to grow and sell, and began studying natives – the flowers we know as wildflowers. I was thrilled – I’d found flowers with a purpose - pure, enduring, American flowers!

I began growing native flowers in January 2020. Until then I knew nothing about growing natives, and it’s a good bit different from growing specialty cut flowers, so I’m learning a lot – some of it the hard, expensive way!

 ...