Marissa Mender-Franklin

My name is Marissa Mender-Franklin, and I own Midtown Bramble & Bloom, a flower farm and florist in Memphis, Tennessee.

The year was 2021, and I was an elementary school art teacher.

And I lived in a house that had a little bit of sun in the front yard, like a little patch of garden in the front yard, but the whole rest of the space was full shade.

And I had grown flowers for our wedding the year before, which is a crazy thing to do and a story in its own right.

Don't do it.

Zero stars.

But I loved growing on that scale.

I was pretty confident that I could find a place in my neighborhood to grow if I could just connect with the right landowner.

I was part of a local buy nothing group on Facebook.

And the day before I made this request, somebody had put out and asked for a French horn for their kid.

And within hours, the group had provided a free French horn.

And it just made me think that if the group can provide a French horn, surely there's somebody in my neighborhood who has a yard that they would let me grow flowers in.

My post was like, oh, flowers in need of a garden.

And within that first week, I think I had 40 offers of yards to grow in.

And that was the start of the farm.

For that first spring, most of the flowers that we grew went to our subscriptions.

And by the fall, we did our first wedding with flowers that we had grown.

Five years in, we're still growing completely in neighbors' yards.

They're all free leases.

All of our landlords are paid solely in flowers and land care.