Have you ever thought about how dreamy it would be to wander through a field of flowers — or better yet, to sit by rows of beautiful blooms with a bottle of wine and some friends? At The Marmalade Lily, your cottagecore dreams can come true. With around an acre-and-a-half of the nine-acre estate dedicated to an indoor and outdoor event venue and flower farm, The Marmalade Lily is as picturesque as it gets.
Throughout most of the year, The Marmalade Lily in Loveland serves as an event venue, hosting weddings and community events at its indoor venue and outdoor spaces. Laura Fisher, the owner of The Marmalade Lily and an avid gardener, was inspired to use a portion of her acres of land to grow a dazzling variety of flowers that the venue uses in its events. The flowers aren’t only for the brides, though. On Wednesdays and Saturdays during high season (which typically runs from the first week of June through the third week of October), The Marmalade Lily hosts u-pick events where guests can come and create their own bouquets of flowers they find on the property for a fee per flower. More recently, the venue has also hosted a number of classes — like wreath-making classes during the holiday season —to pass the floral wisdom of Fisher and her team on to others.
Ready to create your own dream garden? CityBeat sat down with Fisher of The Marmalade Lily to learn more about her business, how to grow the perfect garden and other useful gardening hacks.
CityBeat: What inspired you to open The Marmalade Lily?
Laura Fisher: I live here [on the grounds of The Marmalade Lily]. I raised all my kids here. We've been in business for 10 years. I've always grown flowers and always loved flowers. Literally, the venue and the wedding business came out of a crisis. I have five kids — two adopted — and one had a lot of medical bills and my husband lost his job and we were like, ‘Okay, what can we do?’ We've got all this land. And we knew this was an idea that worked. So we, by a miracle, got a loan from the bank and took a leap of faith and 10 years later, here we are, and it's not anything I ever planned to do. It's been very fun.
CB: When did you launch the u-pick? And how does it work?
LF: We’ve had the u-pick since we’ve been in business. It's Wednesday evenings from 6-9 and Saturday mornings from 9-11, and it generally starts the first week of June and goes until the first frost which is generally like the third week in October. If you have six guests and under, you can just come [to the u-pick]. If you have over six guests we ask you to just let us know [ahead of time] so we can reserve a table — that way it tells us if we need to put out more tables so we can get an idea of how crowded it's going to be.
CB: How does your floral design service work?
LF: We try to use as many of our own blooms in our wedding design work. We design all the flowers for all of the weddings. Brides and grooms can come the summer before and take a look at the flowers we’re growing, but for the most part, we'll say, “Hey, this is what's in bloom.” But we also use a wholesaler and other local flower farms because I can't grow everything here or you have all your different things happen.
We actually have agricultural zoning here, but in order to have that and to have the barn and all of this, at least 50% of our activity in this barn has to be all about our agricultural product. So, during the weekdays, this is a flower studio.
CB: How did you learn so much about growing flowers? What resources and other help do you suggest for those who want to become better gardeners?
LF: You know how when you love something, you just read it? I just love flowers. I also belong to the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers, a fabulous network of growers all across the U.S. They're extremely generous with their knowledge. I’ve belonged there for ten years and I've gone to conferences and you really get all the nitty gritty sciency stuff there.
One of my favorite flower books is called Cool Flowers by Lisa Mason Ziegler. She was kind of a game changer because there are all these flowers that you can start in the fall, you put them in the ground in September, October, and then they're the first ones that come up in spring. You can listen to the Slow Flowers Podcast.
CB: How do you determine where plants and flowers are planted and what's planted together?
LF: You do crop rotation so that you don't have disease and that sort of thing. I document what we have in each bed, and then we rotate it with a big map. But the other thing is we use sustainable practices everywhere. So we don't use pesticides. We use a no-till method of gardening. We actually have mounds and mounds of leaves delivered here from the city of Loveland in the fall, and then compost all winter. We're just constantly adding more and more compost to each bed, and it makes things easier so that when you pull a weed, it's like pulling it out of butter. So it's been great.
CB: What do you see as the most popular flowers used for events and weddings? What, in your opinion, are the most underrated flowers that deserve a leading role in floral bouquets?
LF: So every season has its own belle of the ball. In spring it is for sure the peony and the ranunculus. In the summer, it is the lisianthus. The dahlia is also popular in the fall as well. Those are our main workhorses. They're just beautiful.
I'm gonna say scabiosa is an underrated flower with an ugly name, but it has a stem that has some rigidity to it, and so when you put it in arrangement, it just kind of bounces around. It comes in so many different permutations. There's a fama scabiosa that's just feminine and cuddly and there's a scoop scabiosa that is just big with lots of body.
CB: What flowers do you recommend for a more natural, whimsical garden?
LF: An easy go-to is the zinnia, since there's so many different kinds. So we grow this these are ours, we grow up Benary’s, which is a specialty brand and they literally can get as big as dahlias. But there's also crackle and all sorts of new zinnias that you can have fun with, and they grow so easily. Yarrow is a great, pretty kind of cottagey flower. It's a perennial, so it's easy care. I don't think I don't get a ton of sun here and they do really well. I would say the cosmos flowers evoke the most memories from our guests here, since a lot of their grandmothers grew cosmos. It's so beautiful. It also comes in a lot of different colors and types of bloom.
CB: What classes is The Marmalade Lily hosting in the next few weeks?
LF: Here are some of the classes we have coming up:
June 30: Bridal & Flower Show
July 17: Small Centerpiece Arranging Class during u-pick flowers
July 20: Flower Crown Class for Kids
Aug. 2: Ladies Night U-Pick Flowers & Market
More u-pick craft nights are to-be-announced.
We have a children's book reading with Bike Trail Books the first Saturday of each u-pick month at 10 a.m.
Thanksgiving and Christmas workshops will also be happening this year, with the dates to-be-announced.
All of these will be listed in our website’s calendar of events page.
CB: Is there anything else you want to add?
LF: I love that families come here. I love that it's something for them to do together. And I'm gonna brag on this, but you should see my staff — they really make a difference. They love what they do. People spend their happiest days here. I still have couples who come back for their family photos. I just had a couple that got married in 2017 here. She wanted to come back and get her pictures taken on this swing with her four kids because one of the shots of her at our wedding was on the swing. So we redid the swing photo. I just get chills because, you know, I just love seeing them happy.
The Marmalade Lily, 9850 Schlottman Road, Loveland. More info: themarmaladelily.com.
This story is featured in CityBeat's June 26 print edition.
