Business is blooming at Sabatia Flower Farm

You don’t see a lot of flowers on a flower farm if it’s run right.

“We cut the flowers three days before they open,” explained Rebecca Perry, owner of Sabatia Flower Farm in Marstons Mills, West Barnstable and Osterville. Opening the door to a greenhouse devoted to growing ornamental lilies at her Marstons Mills location, she shows off rows and rows of lush plants whose stems are topped with luminous soft, bulb-like pale pink buds.

To see them in full blossom, you can stop at her roadside stand on Oak Street in West Barnstable, where savvy lily fans know to come by early.

“Every day we harvest 100 to 300 stems,” Perry said, noting Sabatia is known for the high quality of its lilies, prized by the florists on its customer list. “We grow 22,000 lilies a year to sell,” she said, noting proudly that she has heard people say her lilies are the best around.

Lilies, she said, need 80 to 100 days to mature, and after cutting require several days of refrigeration. She grows more than half a dozen varieties, harvesting three times a year, and they are a signature part of the business she launched nearly three years ago.

Sabatia Flower Farm, she said, was a (literal) outgrowth of the business she has run for 30 years, Flowers by Rebecca, which maintains about 90 clients. She grew flowers on her property on Oak Street in West Barnstable to use in her gardening business, and began selling cut flowers from a roadside stand. The cut flowers proved popular, and she decided they needed their own business.

Flowers, she said, “bring people joy,” and people like that her flowers are grown right here. “It’s a buy local thing. They’re cut today and delivered to the florist today… The alternative is you have flowers from South Africa.”

Sabatia now has a strong client list extending from Barnstable east to Orleans, and she also sells to “DIY brides” who will come buy buckets of peonies, a popular flower for weddings. “We’ve got brides calling us all the time,” Perry said.

Also in demand are dahlias, zinnias and sunflowers. In addition to greenhouses at all three of her properties, Perry has ground plantings of perennials and annuals to harvest all summer.

“We grow a little bit of everything at both properties,” she said, noting one annual field is planted with 500 dahlias.

With three full-time employees and several part-time workers at the flower farm, she also employs about 15 people in her gardening business. “We have a great staff both at the farm and in my gardening business. I’m blessed with people who are hard workers and take a lot of pride in what they do,” she said. “We have a really good reputation and we do really good work. We’re proud of what we do.”

Originally from Rhode Island, Perry said she comes from a family of gardeners, but resisted that heritage at first. “I never did think I would do this for a living,” she said, laughing. But after someone offered her a job in the field in the mid-1980s, she found she loved it and soon launched her own business.

“I have not looked back. Some of the worst years in the economy have been my best years,” she said. “It’s not about making a million dollars. It’s about employing people, and pride in what we do. We’re excited about what we’re doing here.”