Paula Erickson walks among delicate dots of yellow, purple, and white. She is searching for something with a touch of wildness to complete her bouquet. Rows of sweet pea, foxgloves, anemones, and ranunculus — all early summer flowers — stand, still lush and tall under her care, despite the midday heat. She settles on adding a long lacy frond of fennel for the finishing touch.
Before Erickson grew flowers at her Truro farm, she lived in Wellfleet, where she worked at Hatches with Lauren McClellan and then later as a social worker with Outer Cape Health Services. All the while, she tended gardens. “I’ve outgrown so many plots,” she says. There was the one at the community garden. Then she helped renew some of the land at Hamblen Farm with her friend Sue Anthony. She set up a flower stand in her Wellfleet neighborhood. Flowers, she noticed, made people especially happy.
Since moving with her partner, the artist Megan Hinton, into a 1767 Cape in Truro in 2021, Erickson has been working an acre or so of soil — a rarity on this sandspit — streaked with seams of seashells. There must have been an ancient midden here, she says.
“The house is on a rise, but the garden is relatively low-lying,” Erickson says, which could account for the accretion of organic matter. She’s been improving the soil with salt marsh grass, used as compost, and, more recently, with “hen tea” — courtesy of manure from her 23 chickens and one rooster.
Work on restoring the house began with digging to allow a foundation to go in. Between that and the garden, she says, “we did so much digging, we decided to call the place Mudlark Farm .” (Mudlarking is an old Britishism for digging in the tidal flats along the Thames.)
With this new space to grow flowers, Erickson is planning to set up a roadside stand. For now, she’s got Posies of Mudlark Farm, a bouquet subscription business started at the urging of friends and neighbors. Subscriptions for weekly, every other week, or monthly bouquets run throughout the growing season and cost $250 to $450. Among the posies ready for pickup, she sets out a few extras from her herb and vegetable patches. She’ll be bringing potatoes and garlic to the farmers market in Truro in the weeks ahead.
“People love it,” she says. “They never know quite what they’re going to get.” Her bouquets change over the course of the season, depending on what’s in bloom in her garden. “I love incorporating wildflowers, so the bouquet usually has something that I’ve foraged in it,” Erickson says.
Right now is an in-between time for flowers, she says. As the pale colors of spring fade, the warm colors of summer emerge. Every year, she looks forward to August and September, when the dahlias are in bloom. Whatever blossoms, fronds, and pods she assembles, Erickson says, her pleasure is in “making them sing together.”
Q: How do you compost? 