A woman owned floristry company specializing in sustainable designs for weddings and events. Our business is 100% floral foam free and our mission is to discover new ways of designing to help the next generation of florists create beautiful works of art without as much waste and havoc on our environment.

We have a small flower farm which we use to supplement our wedding and event designs, as well as share with our community at the RVA Big Market during the summer growing season.

How It Started

My name is Lauren Malone. I live in Richmond, VA with my husband, Ben, our dog, Luna, our two cats, Felix and Milo, and our growing flower farm. Ben and I met in back in 2013 while working as professional dancers with the Richmond Ballet. It wasn’t until a couple years later when we were paired together for an upcoming performance that we fell in love and started our life together. 

In 2018, we got married in Maine. I decided that I wanted to have control over the florals and wanted to design them myself. This was my first exposure to working with a large quantity of flowers. I had no idea what I was doing, but honestly, even knowing what I know now, the flowers were one of my very favorite parts about my wedding day. From that moment, I was hooked.

Over the next few years, I volunteered/begged my friends, sister, and anyone I knew who was engaged, to let me do their flowers for their wedding. I would do all of the labor and designing for free because I absolutely loved working with flowers and getting creative with new color palettes and varieties of textures. At this point I was still dancing professionally full time and honestly had no intentions of retiring anytime soon.

Flash forward to 2020. Ben and I bought a new home right at the start of the pandemic which had no landscaping and plenty of renovations that needed to be made. The timing, though at a terrible time in the world, was perfect. Because of the pandemic I was unable to work for several months, and so tired of being inside, that I started spending all day everyday outside working on cutting out, designing, and cultivating my dream cottage garden. I would spend about an hour each morning while drinking my coffee watching YouTube videos about landscaping, gardening, and growing flowers from seed, then take what I learned and put it into practice in my own garden. I started growing flowers from seed just for fun. Very hardy annuals like zinnias and cosmos, and to my surprise—it worked! I became obsessed with searching for the most beautiful and interesting flower seeds and building a collection to try out the next year.

By the fall of 2020, I had acquired a huge selection of seeds and had big dreams of filling my home with hundreds of flowers. I figured that I would have plenty of flowers to spare, and that I should then try to make some money during the summer by selling them at our local farmers market.

During the final five months of my dancing career, I dreamed big dreams about my flower business. I knew I wanted to start a flower farm, work from home—my happy place, sell flowers at the farmers market, and maybe get the chance to design florals for a few weddings. Thus Monarch Flower Farm was born and quickly became my obsession. 

Once flowers started to grow in the spring, I would take photos of mason jar arrangements and sell them on Instagram. I would them deliver the flowers either in the morning on my way to work, or in the evening after a long day of dancing in a mask. I was constantly daydreaming about flowers, coming up with business and marketing ideas, and studying wedding florals in hopes that one day I would get the opportunity to create beautiful designs on a daily basis for my job.