Segment Title: Introduction to Cut Flowers and Cut Flower Resources
Segment: 02 of 08, 8:45 slot
Webinar Date: July 23, 2026
Speaker: Allan Armitage, Professor Emeritus of Horticulture, University of Georgia
Recorded introduction: Narrated by Bethany Harris
Moderator: Bethany Harris
Duration: 16:37.4 (997.418 s, measured)
Series: Cut Flower Symposium
CEU Categories: [PENDING]
NARRATIVE SUMMARY
Allan Armitage, Professor Emeritus of Horticulture at the University of Georgia and author of 17 books, opens the symposium proper with sixteen minutes recorded while on holiday in North Carolina, camera off for most of it. He gives himself two jobs: say what the life of a cut flower grower actually is, and point the room at the resources for it.
The first half is the unvarnished version of flower farming. He reads a set of comments he collected from growers over the years, all anonymous, and none of them soften anything. There is nothing easy about this business. You will work harder than ever before. It is arduous work, long hours, times you want to throw the towel in, and forget about taking a holiday, because you will always be needed on the farm. He notes that the people who said those things are doing just fine. His own advice runs alongside. Start small and expand slowly, which he cannot overemphasize, because the one thing true for everybody was that some started too big and it got away from them quickly. Know the time constraints of whoever is helping, which may be a spouse, a kid, a grandkid, or a grandmother on her hands and knees. Learn equipment maintenance, because the heater will fail on the coldest night and the tunnels will blow away. Get to know your bank manager, because farming costs money and one grower told him it takes at least three years before the farm makes any.
The second half is a resource tour. He tells serious growers to join the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers and walks through what comes with it: a listserv, sources for seeds and plugs, equipment, farm visits including one at the Three Porch Farm in the fall, Cut Flowers of the Year lists running back to 2000 and drawn from trials rather than seed inventory, and more than 2,500 members. He names books, an app at $4.99, his out of print 1993 cut flower reference that he keeps in print himself, a newest book with a co-author, and a sowing calendar. He walks one entry, yarrow, to show what a reference gives you: harvest when the pollen is visible, useful selections, spacing, and the cold treatment yarrow needs over winter. He closes on markets, on doing your homework before planting a single plug, and on people rather than plants.
CHAPTER TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Recorded Introduction: Allan Armitage
1:00 Opening Remarks from North Carolina
1:43 Lanie Riner, GGIA, and Showing Up
2:38 The Idyllic Life of Flower Farming
4:49 Anonymous Comments from Cut Flower Growers
6:09 Equipment, Structures, and Your Bank Manager
7:40 Where to Find Resources
8:14 The Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers
9:47 Books, and the 1993 Cut Flower Reference
10:34 An App, and the Newest Book
11:27 Yarrow, One Reference Entry Walked Through
12:50 A Sowing Calendar, and What Comes Next
13:45 Do Your Homework Before You Plant
14:53 It Is All About the People
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
Q: What does Armitage say the working life of a cut flower grower is actually like?
A: He reads comments he collected from growers over the years, kept anonymous. There is nothing easy about this business, you will work harder than ever before, it is arduous work with long hours and times you want to throw the towel in, and you should forget about taking a holiday because you will always be needed on the farm. He adds that these comments come from people who are doing just fine, and asks growers who have been in the trenches to use them when teaching others.
Q: What is the one piece of advice he says he cannot overemphasize?
A: Start small and expand slowly. He says that if there was one thing true for everybody who spoke to him, it was that some of them started too big and it got away from them very quickly. He repeats the point later in the talk when he tells growers they cannot grow everything.
Q: Whose time constraints does he say you have to plan around?
A: Your own and your staff’s, and he is direct about who staff usually means on a flower farm. It might be your husband or wife, your kid, your grandkids, or your grandmother on her hands and knees who cannot get up. The reason to know the constraints is that the lovely patch of seedlings you put out becomes a field, and it is easy to be overwhelmed.
Q: Which equipment failures does he treat as certainties rather than risks?
A: Two. It is a given that the heater will fail on the coldest night, and it is a given that the plastic tunnels will be blown away with the wind. That is why he tells growers to learn about equipment maintenance and structures. Make sure you know how to get the heater fixed and how to put the tunnels back in, because that is farming.
Q: Why does he tell growers to get to know their bank manager?
A: Because farming costs money and you will likely be spending some quality time together. He gives the examples of a greenhouse that actually stands up during the winter and the refrigerator every cut flower grower should have for flowers that are harvested but not yet delivered. One of his growers told him it takes at least three years before you actually make any money, and that money will likely go right back to the farm.
Q: Is the cut flower business in trouble?
A: He says it is not. Responding to Lanie Riner’s remarks about droughts taking a few growers out, he says cut flowers in America are doing just fine, thank you. There is a ton of cut flower growers, and although growers often feel like the only one in their area, they are not. He describes people doing this in a backyard and people doing it on 10 acres, and names the Three Porch Farm just outside Athens, Georgia as a place he visits.
Q: Which association does he tell serious growers to join, and what comes with membership?
A: The Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers, which he calls the best resource for serious growers and simply the best. He lists useful material, listservs, sources for seeds and plugs, equipment, Cut Flowers of the Year, and farm visits, with one at the Three Porch Farm later on in the fall. It has over 2,500 members, which is his point that a grower is not alone. The listserv is the part he singles out: post to ask who has some decent sunflowers, or what the group recommends, and the answer is there. He says he does not want to hear about how much it costs, because you are going to be investing money.
Q: What is Cut Flowers of the Year, and why does he say to trust it?
A: It is a set of annual selections that runs from 2026 back through 2025 and 2024 all the way to 2000. He says these are based on trials, not just somebody who happens to have some seed for sale. The selections are grouped as herbaceous, woody, bulb, and foliage, and he points out that a geranium made the foliage category because it is really a variegated foliage.
Q: What does he say about GGIA?
A: He backs Lanie Riner’s pitch. When Lanie says GGIA, he says, it is a fabulous organization, and he cannot imagine why a person in the industry would not be part of it. He calls it a no brainer and says it does not matter whether you are a cut flower grower or you have a greenhouse, just get there. He also says plainly that he is not making any money from recommending it.
Q: Beyond the association, what reference tools does he point growers to?
A: Books by several authors he names, his own cut flower reference from 1993 and revised in 2003, which is out of print, expensive on Amazon, and which he keeps in print himself; an app called Armitage’s Great Garden Plants at $4.99, which he compares to the price of a bad hamburger and says works for growers, gardeners, and landscapers alike; a newest book on specialty cut flowers written with a colleague; and a cut flower sowing calendar covering how and when to sow, sold for about ten dollars and delivered to your email.
Q: When should yarrow be harvested, and what does it need over the winter?
A: Harvest when the pollen is visible before cutting, which he calls really important because otherwise the stems have no shelf life. Yarrow also needs a cold treatment. You are not going to get yarrow to grow, he says, unless you put them through the winter. He names Moonshine and Coronation Gold among useful selections and says spacing and similar details are covered in the same reference.
Q: When are the most profitable markets, and what should a grower settle before planting?
A: Early season and late season crops are the most profitable, because the market is much less in the summertime when summer flowers are everywhere. Before planting a single plug or seed, do your homework and choose wisely, since there is no end to what can be grown but a finite number a grower can market, sell, and make a profit with. He also says to talk to your buyers first, whether that is a farmer’s market, a florist, or a wholesaler, way before you get into this thing too much.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Named on camera by Armitage:
- Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers,
ascfg.org. He names the organization at 8:14 and reads the address aloud at 8:55. The address was confirmed against the recording in the audio verification sweep of 2026-08-08. - Cut Flowers of the Year, annual trial-based selections from 2000 through 2026, in herbaceous, woody, bulb, and foliage categories.
- A farm visit at the Three Porch Farm, which he places later on in the fall.
- Books. He names four authors worth reading: John Dole, Lisa Mason-Ziegler, Lennie Larkin, and Lynn Byczynski. The last two did not transcribe reliably and were confirmed against the recording in the audio sweep of 2026-08-08.
- His 1993 cut flower reference, revised 2003. Out of print, available on Amazon at a price he calls very expensive, and kept in print by him.
- Armitage’s Great Garden Plants, a phone app at $4.99.
- A newest book on specialty cut flowers written with his colleague Kelly Garcia, whom he names again at 15:27 as the co-author.
- A cut flower sowing calendar, about ten dollars, delivered by email.
- His website,
allanarmitage.net, with the discount codewalkaboutfor free shipping. He reads the address aloud twice, at 11:12 and 13:07. It transcribed four different ways and was confirmed against the recording in the audio sweep of 2026-08-08. The code was stable across all three source transcriptions. - His email address, which he offers to the audience and does not speak on the recording.
Bethany Harris closes the segment by saying his website and the promo code walkabout were dropped into the chat.
SOURCE NOTES
This is a full-track segment at 16:37 and the standard Stage 2 targets applied without light-track scaling. Four things about the source shaped the file and are recorded here.
No live Q&A block, and 12 pairs anyway. Nobody asks Armitage a question. Bethany Harris’s two lines at the end confirm that links were posted. Every pair above is built from Armitage’s own remarks, and the count landed at the top of the 8 to 12 range because the talk is dense with specific, answerable material. Nothing was drawn from outside the transcript.
The 0:00 chapter covers a restart, not two topics. The recorded introduction narrated by Bethany Harris plays twice in the media, blocks 1 through 12, ending at 00:00:59,899. Both passes are the same 30 seconds. Armitage’s own content starts at 1:00.
Chapter density is about one marker every 71 seconds, 14 across 16:37. That is denser than one every 3 to 5 minutes. The second half of the talk is a resource list with a new subject roughly every minute, and markers were placed at genuine transitions rather than on a clock. The closest pair, 7:40 to 8:14, is 34 seconds apart and clear of YouTube’s 10 second minimum. The last marker is 1:44 before the end.
Two content questions were written around at Stage 2 and both have since been settled by the audio verification sweep of 2026-08-08. Neither settlement changes a word of the summary, the chapters, or the Q&A above.
- At 8:04, block 148, Armitage says GGIA where the twenty blocks that follow describe the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers, which he names outright at 8:14. The recording confirms he said GGIA. It is a slip of the tongue by the speaker, not an engine error, and the attribution reasoning is unchanged: the listserv, the seeds and plugs, the farm visits, Cut Flowers of the Year, and the 2,500 members are attributed here to the association he names, and none of them are attributed to GGIA. The separate GGIA question above uses only the passage at 1:43, where the referent is unambiguous.
- On yarrow colour, he says at 12:00 that the yellow forms are much better than the coloured forms, that they may not have as much sex appeal but they last longer. At 12:41, walking a selection list, he says the coloured ones down the bottom are some of the best for cuts. The recording shows two different slides and two different selection subsets, so both statements are true and there is no contradiction. The Q&A pair on yarrow does not raise colour and stays correct as written.
All eighteen [VERIFY] flags in the Stage 1 file are now closed, resolved against the recording on 2026-08-08 and removed from the corrected SRT. When this package was built they were open, and no chapter title and no Q&A answer above was built on a flagged token. That constraint is no longer binding, and the resolutions have been applied here where they fill a gap: the two web addresses are now printed in Additional Resources, and the two author names and the co-author name are now given. The narrative summary, the chapter list, and the twelve Q&A pairs are unchanged, because none of them rested on a flagged token in the first place.
One preview to handle carefully downstream. At 13:18 Armitage tells the room it will hear about disease management, heat, drought, and lisianthus, and says he thinks Katie is going to talk about lisianthus. The first three match segments 08 and 06. The lisianthus talk was never delivered by anyone. That line is what Armitage expected of the day, not a description of what happened, and the chapter title at 12:50 keeps it general for that reason.
Processed for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / Cut Flower Symposium Archives
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1), GTBOP_Transcript_2026-07-23_ArmitageCutFlowerIntro.srt (333 blocks)
Updated 2026-08-08 in the post-pipeline correction pass, applying the closed audio verification sweep. Block skeleton unchanged.