Speakers: Natalie Bumgarner, Associate Professor and Extension Specialist in Residential and Consumer Horticulture, University of Tennessee; Celeste Scott, Commercial Horticulture Specialist for West Tennessee, UT Extension
Recorded introduction: Narrated by Bethany Harris, then Whitney Ottinger
Moderator: Gabrielle LaTora, Agriculture and Natural Resources Agent, Fulton County, Georgia
Duration: 30:30.7 (1830.719 s, measured)
Series: Cut Flower Symposium
Webinar Date: July 23, 2026
Recorded Introduction
Prerecorded speaker introductions. Bethany Harris cues the segment and Whitney Ottinger reads both bios, so the recorded introduction carries two voices. Bethany Harris’s single line keeps its inline label; see the source note in the footer.
Bethany Harris: And now you’ll hear a little bit about our next speakers.
Whitney Ottinger: Dr. Natalie Bumgarner is an associate professor and extension specialist in residential and consumer horticulture at the University of Tennessee, where she also coordinates the statewide Master Gardener program. With two decades in horticulture, she translates university research into practical guidance for growers and gardeners across the state of Tennessee. Celeste Scott is UT Extension’s commercial horticulture specialist for West Tennessee, based at the West Tennessee Ag Research and Education Center in Jackson. Raised on a family farm, she specializes in commercial and residential horticulture from crop production to plant and pest diagnosis. She also works hand-in-hand with growers across the region. Together, she and Dr. Natalie Bumgarner will share the latest from Tennessee’s research.
A Multi-State Program
Natalie Bumgarner: Hey, good morning everybody. We’re so excited to be here on this multi-state visit. So we’ve already heard from Georgia, North Carolina, and now Tennessee. I know I’ve got Kentucky and other folks coming. We are really looking forward to being a part of this program and sharing with you about some of what we’re doing in Tennessee.
So… As you could probably guess from our introductions, Celeste has really been our point person for engaging with the awesome cut flower growers that we have in Tennessee. And I’m going to pass the baton to her to set the stage for what our industry is like and how this has fueled what we do at the University of Tennessee for our cut flower growers.
How Cut Flowers Took Off in Tennessee
Celeste Scott: Sure. Thanks, Natalie. I hope everybody can hear me well. So as is probably typical with many of you that are on our call, we saw interest in cut flower production really begin to kick in there in that all-famous COVID era, right? And through our Center for Profitable Agriculture, we were able to secure a grant that allowed them to look into areas of specialty crops that we saw really gaining traction in Tennessee and showed promise for true growth in that particular industry. That allowed us to do some traveling and some visiting. We were able to go out to Utah and meet with Melanie who you’re going to hear from here in a little bit. And she really gave us some great ideas and really opened our eyes to how this industry may really begin to expand in Tennessee. So we brought that information back with us.
We began hosting like meet and greets and workshops across the state and everyone that we scheduled surprisingly packed out the house, right? We were out of seats. More people than we could even support were wanting to register for those. And we were able to carry that interest actually into another larger statewide conference called Pick Tennessee Conference and things have just blossomed from there. Our contact list for those who are already involved in cut flower production in some way specifically in Tennessee has grown beyond 300 contacts. We are beginning to develop a state association to support those folks through marketing, budgeting, education, all those things that are really going to add more value for that very specific local grower.
With all of that happening, we were able to apply for another grant, a specialty crop block grant. And three years ago Natalie and I and the rest of our team pictured here embarked on a multifaceted project. Natalie, do you want to tell us about that?
The Specialty Crop Block Grant
Natalie Bumgarner: Yeah, yeah. So you’ll hear pieces of this. A little bit of this work is still in process, but of course, the flower geeks, the plant people just wanted to put plants in the ground and count them and fertilize them differently and all that fun stuff, but this is a great collaboration with our on-the-ground farm management team as well as colleagues in our ag economics department. So we’ve done consumer perspective, we’ve done surveys, we’ve done enterprise budgets, and the budgets especially we’ll share with y’all if you’re interested, and some of the rest of the material is still coming out, but we’re really excited about this being a way to engage with the great Tennessee growers that you’re going to get to hear from in some of the breakout sessions.
Building the Trials Around What Growers Grow
Celeste Scott: So we want to take a few minutes and fill you in on what’s been going on with our field trials. Everything that we’ve done, we tried to fashion this after what our growers were currently doing, right? We had a large influx of new growers into this area, and as many of you are aware, warm season cut flowers are the gateway flower into cut flower production. They’re easy to start from seed. It’s a good group of plants to get your footing with. And so we were trying to focus our trials on plants that we knew that they were actively growing. We went out, we made lots of visits on site, farm visits and conversations to find out what people really wanted the most support in, and that’s really what helped us drive how we wanted to fashion our field trials.
Two Locations, Two Mulches
So we have replications in Knoxville as well as in Jackson. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Tennessee, that is about six hours away from one another. So we have very different growing conditions, different soil types, temperature climates, all those things. So definitely we wanted to do our replications in two different locations to support growers from all across our state. And then here you can see we started out with a huge combination of plants. We had focal flowers, filler flowers, greenery, everything focused there in that warm season crop category. And it was overwhelming to say the least to collect all that data.
We were keeping up with stems per square foot that first year we were also measuring stem lengths and trying to really see where we were going to find some differences, right? We selected to grow things on fabric and or plastic. I use fabric, Natalie used plastic because we needed to cut down on time. We were using every bit of information that we used to put these trials in to help build our budgets that you’re going to hear about here in a little bit. And so we know that labor is one of the highest input costs from growers. And so… The best way to cut down on labor is going to be to spend a little more up front, spend a little more time putting those plants in the ground and moving forward in that way.
Fertility Treatments and the Maryland Baseline
So we were primarily looking at fertility comparisons. But really the only guidance that we have in this area for cut flowers is from the University of Maryland, and these were their general assumptions for fertility levels broken down into these three different categories. We decided to look at low as one pound of nitrogen per thousand square foot medium two pounds and high as three pounds per square foot. In that first year we only trialed low versus mediums… You’re going to see here in a minute what we found out from that. That was able to help us hone in a little bit on those plant types that we were seeing responses to fertilizer differences. So year two, we expanded that a bit and looked at low versus high. And then this year we’ve refined it even more.
However, we’re going to look all across the board. We have a control of no fertility. We’re going to look at low, medium, and high, and that’s really going to help round out the information that we’re putting together. We used a 20-10-20 soluble fertilizer through a Dosatron system to deliver those nutrients.
Zinnias
So as I’m sure you’re all aware, we trialed zinnias, obviously, and those were one that were showing some good responses to that fertility doses. And here you can see we’ve trialed everything from the tiny Zinderellas to our customary trade industry standard Benary’s Giants. We added in Agaves a few years ago to get that different flower head type, that cactus flower type, and of course relied on those Queenys as they are a crowd favorite. And then as new cultivars come out, we definitely try to include those as well. So Natalie?
Knoxville Trends
Natalie Bumgarner: Yeah, so we’ll share a little bit of data with you. We love to show the trends, and of course all these are projects that are still in process, but you can see here… Probably no surprise to all of you who are growing these, that the Benary’s are larger flowers, they’re going to have fewer stems per square foot, but of course the quality is high. And in our first year in Knoxville, we saw this general trend of… Seeing some potential for increase as we went up that fertility scale. And you can also see a range here of flower sizes. So we’re beginning to dial in. and begin to see the impacts on these different cultivars.
Time is of essence in the data collection process, and Celeste was very diplomatic. ourselves and the couple of poor folks that we drafted and paid to help us were overwhelmed in the first year. So we refined some of our cultivar numbers, and you can see here we add in another cultivar, and in Knoxville those trends were remaining similar even when we went to high. And so, of course, that led us to this year where we want to really look at all of these trends.
The Jackson Plots
Celeste Scott: So looking at those same plants there for Jackson, our responses again looking very similar to what Natalie had going on. You’ll notice our overall flower counts were a bit lower and I’ll have to say that that’s due to our harvesting tactics. I was cutting stems that were much larger at the very beginning, and as things went along we were able to get on board and be more closely representative of how we were harvesting those. Also the area that I was growing in was a brand new prepared growing site, whereas Natalie had been planting into an area on the organic farm that has been growing plants for a number of years. So it had some existing nutrients and some loosened soil and things like that. So that’s why we see a few differences, but the trend is similar.
And then moving right on into 2025, the same thing. We increased those fertility levels, still seeing some responses. You’ll see a little dip there on the Queeny Lime Orange, you’re like, wonder what happened there. We had some issues with a septic drainage field, moved plots in year two, and so we definitely had some lower quantities there in the zone where our high fertility levels were because we had some conflicting water impacts there in that area.
Zinnia Takeaways
So obviously we have some great takeaways from our zinnias. Yes we saw some differences in increasing nitrogen levels. We’re seeing trends that increasing those levels could continue to increase stem counts. And so that’s why we are wanting to really look at that full picture again in this final year. We also collected a lot of other fun information. Interestingly enough, Zinderellas were our highest cull percentage. Queeny Limes are great, but they have to be harvested at peak for best color or they just look dirty and dingy and can really turn some growers off, especially there in the middle of our warmest growing season. And obviously we can always struggle with late season disease and insect pests there on those zinnias.
Celosia
So let’s move on and talk about celosia quickly. So we started out with again a wide range of different celosia types. We had wheat types, we had plume types, coxcomb type, and really tried to start out with some of those industry standards and then mix some tried and trues in as we got a little more experience under our belt. And so Natalie’s going to share with you all some of our numbers from that celosia data.
The Knoxville Celosia Data
Natalie Bumgarner: Yeah, so as you saw in our first year, we had multiple cultivars that we were taking a lot of data on, and we really tried to look at wheat, look at plume, look at coxcomb so that we could really see the differences across the different types of celosia. And you can look at that and see Flamingo Feather, of course the wheat type… And we were seeing the largest trends toward impact of fertility in the plume types. Those single stems, maybe not, we blame ourselves. We don’t necessarily blame the flowers, but we honed in on seeing some of those impacts on the plume types, and we moved when we went to 2025 to smaller type of coxcomb type. Celeste will share probably a little bit in the summary about the Kurume, but you can see that compared to zinnia, which had a more consistent fertility impact across those two years, we actually saw a little bit more variability in the more vigorous celosia. And of course we’re really interested to see this third year worth of data so that we can really see over time… How much, if at all, are some of these fertility treatments impacting these more vigorous, productive, very multi-stem types of plants like some of the plume type celosia?
Why the Jackson Celosia Data Was Discarded
Celeste Scott: All right. And you may be wondering, Celeste, why didn’t you tell us about your information from Jackson on celosia? And that’s because apparently I was a poor celosia grower. In year one, I learned lessons. I planted them too early, okay? They can be adversely affected by cool night temperatures. I got them out in the ground a little too early because they were getting root bound, which is also something that you need to steer clear of. is starting celosia by transplants. Constricted root growth as well as cooler night temperatures can induce early flowering. And so my numbers from 2024 weren’t super reliable. And then in 2025 my research plot is at a production row crop research facility, and we had a little bit of off-target herbicide damage from a neighboring plot that we have since rectified. We tossed some of that Jackson data out the window for 2024 and 2025.
Celosia Cultivar Takeaways
But definitely some of the takeaways that we had with celosia: Sunday Green has had reliably long, thin stems for us. And that for me is super important with celosia is you can get that fasciation where you’re dealing with, have a beautiful bloom that’s going to look great in a bouquet, but the stem is so thick that you can’t really make it work diameter-wise for what you’re needing those to fit into. So Sunday Greens were excellent. We expanded that to include Sunday Oranges last year. They had beautiful bloom but I wouldn’t say that their stem standards were as comparable.
Flamingo Feather was a favorite of ours as well. That was a nice filler flower, had super long stems, so if you’re looking for something to really get that length on, that would be an area to focus on. It was also a reliable re-bloomer. You could cut that way down and several weeks later get another cut off of those. The Pampas Plume were great for us as far as quality and versatility, and then Kurume was something that we added last year, even though it’s an older cultivar, and we really loved that smaller coxcomb form and it had some variability in it as well as far as shape so it was always fun to see what that was going to shoot out for us.
Sunflowers
All right, so we’ll talk just a minute about sunflowers. We did sunflowers in year one and then realized oh we’re using all single stem sunflower cuts, so I can’t imagine that fertility is going to impact the number of stems that we get on those very much.
Three Spacing Treatments
They were pretty reliable as long as your transplants were healthy that we were going to get one good cut per plant, but we did see lots of variability in flower head size, and carrying that through for last year and then through this year we decided instead of looking at fertility for sunflowers, let’s focus on some spacing treatments and see if we can really push those flower head sizes while also possibly utilizing some plant spacing templates that people may already be using in burnt fabrics, right? Because you don’t want to, it’s very complicated to be having to use different planting standards between cropping systems.
So we thought let’s look at one plant on six-inch spacing, that’s kind of industry standard, right? Four to six-inch spacing. Then we wanted to look at what would that look like if we planted two plants in each like planting hole, right? Still on six-inch centers. And then we also looked at nine-inch centers because a lot of our larger warm season annuals are being grown on nine-inch centers, and we said people may want to utilize those fabric templates that they already have. Let’s see what happens when we put two plants per every nine inches and see how that affects that flower head size. Let’s move on, Natalie.
How Spacing Changed Flower Head Diameter
All right, so for last year we actually had two successions, and you can see those bars here as well as an average total. I had a little bit of variability there. You’re like, how did those numbers get so high on the first succession? We had a really moist spring, and after we made that first cut they actually branched, even though we were using all single-stem cuts, and we were not harvesting anything that had a stem that was below the diameter of, say, a pencil, and so these were usable marketable stems and so we went ahead and counted those. But the information we really want to see is on the next slide. So how did this spacing affect that percentage of flower head diameter that those spacings produced? As reliable, we’re looking there at that six inch spacing per one plant. These things are what we assumed that we would find as far as stems per square foot. We had a pretty even distribution of flower heads that were below four inches wide, those that were above four inches, and even a pretty high percentage of those that were getting into that above six inch diameter, which makes them pretty not as versatile, not as useful for mixed bouquet type.
considerations, right? Yes, if you were selling by bunches of flowers, that would be great. But even then you’re going to have such a high number percentage of those flowers that are below six inches, it just shakes things up and we wanted to have a way for you guys to be more confident in what you were producing. When we looked at the six-inch spacing with two plants, which essentially brings down planting population down to a three-inch planting pattern, we had our highest percentage of flowers below four-inch flower head diameters. I’m not just talking about the disc. I’m talking about from petal to petal, right? So very usable, very versatile. in those mixed bouquet type settings.
But what was even more surprising to me was that once we got into that nine-inch spacing with every two plants, we had the highest four-inch and below percentage as well as the lowest percentage of flowers that were six inches in diameter above. We’re hoping that we can replicate that this year and compare what we saw last year to what’s coming out this year and hopefully set you guys up for a little better situation, confident in expecting those flower head sizes and numbers that you’re going to get and help be able to allow you to plan for how many plants you need to plant in that particular crop for each succession.
Sunflower Takeaways
Okay, Natalie. So here’s our takeaways. I feel like I’ve talked a lot about sunflowers, but they were all great. We didn’t come across any cultivars that we were super set against. Reliable, resilient. As long as you have a good planting schedule laid out, you’re going to be able to have reliable harvest through a long period of the growing season, starting in some areas of Tennessee as early as Mother’s Day, believe it or not, and pushing the limits there as far as frost goes. So definitely making sure you’re changing your color palette of cultivars that you’re planting to match the other tones, those warm tones or cool tones, depending on what part of the season we’re in. Had… We saw some issues with insects, but that was primarily on foliage feeding. We only saw a flower head or petal damage on primarily the lighter colored flowers. Always be cautious of that. And so we can move on from sunflowers.
The And More, and the Trialing Summary
And of course I just had to throw in pictures of the And More, right? We had several different types of flowers that we trialed, and this was by no means our favorites. The celosia and zinnia were just the tip of the iceberg, and so we have a lot more information that we are going to be able to share with you guys. And that kind of leads us into our next slide, which is the trialing summary. And basically we just want you guys to know that we’re putting all this information together as we speak. We’re going to have this published. People are going to be able to access our production guides and a lot of the things that we learn through these trialing efforts. And that wraps us up for trialing. And Natalie is going to share with us some about our marketing side of the project.
Marketing: The Grower and Consumer Surveys
Natalie Bumgarner: Yeah, absolutely. So this is a snapshot of what we’ve done. so far in working to expand the cut flower market, which is of course of interest to all of us. And so a snapshot of just a couple of the surveys that we have done. We did a grower survey that was followed by consumer survey and the key elements of this consumer survey audience are that they all bought cut flowers in the year prior to the survey, and two-thirds of them were buying local cut flowers. So to the best of our ability, this survey audience is in fact your customer base, our stakeholder audience. And while it’s a majority of Tennessee that participate in the survey. We have a lot of the rest of the southeastern states because we want to make sure that to the best of our ability it’s pretty representative.
Where Growers Sell, and Why Consumers Buy
So some of the things that we’re really honing in on is accessibility and kind of the contact of customer with the local cut flower. And so this is an element from our grower survey. So from the grower perspective, where are you selling your local cut flowers? And so, surprise to none of us, certainly yourselves, are that farmers markets, direct to consumer, are some of those highest areas. Pick your own, some CSAs, and clearly people were allowed to select more than one of these marketing options in the survey. Then when we flip that and look at the consumer side of the survey, we really want to think about what are kind of the motivational drivers for the purchase of local cut flowers. And about 62% were buying for gifts, right? So a little bit less than 40% growing for themselves. And a fairly high number, 40, potentially higher, are reporting this as impulse purchases. So we want to think about this in terms of location, right? Accessibility, getting the product in the face of our consumers.
And this is one of my favorite questions from the survey. We ask consumers, at what point did you decide to buy these cut flowers? And so a third of our prepared audience knew what they wanted when they went into the shopping area. 50% knew they wanted it when they saw it. This is our ability to capture audience, and the 16% that these are my people. I don’t recall the point where I decided to buy this arrangement. I just walked out of the store with flowers. I don’t know how that happened, right? But those kind of two-thirds are definitely the folks that are very much open for a local cut flower purchase.
Where Consumers Buy, and What Stops Them
So this is on the consumer side. You can see the higher response number here. Where are you buying cut flowers? Right, so this is not local specific, this is cut flowers, and we see really high grocery store number. We think back to our growers and we saw much lower percentage of our local cut flowers. growers that were selling at grocery stores. We add local to this question and we see the grocery store percentage go down. We start to see mass merchandisers, wholesale clubs, as well as local florists, farmers market pick up. But we can see that even in this local cut flower area, a large percentage of our customers are still buying from grocery stores, right? Really highly accessible locations. This is an attitudes question. And we see high good promising types of feedback here. Local consumers want to support local producers, they largely see cut flower local cut flowers as something that are grown within their state. But we still see, in some ways, probably not an ideally high number of people who think that local cut flowers are not available where they live or not something that they think about very much. So there’s still a lot of room for more customer engagement and market expansion in these areas.
And then a final question for us to think about and look over are what are the barriers to local cut flower purchases from our consumers? Now the high price, we can move, well, we’ll work and move them on that, right? But the thing that we want to kind of hone in is that low availability. How is it that we can get our product your product, I should say, more in the face of our consumers. So it’s really about accessibility for those planned, our 34% of our planners, as well as for those unplanned purchases. And so we’re going to be doing a little bit more work on this and willingness to pay this fall… We’ve also done some willingness to pay surveys that show that as the percentage of local cut flowers increases in that bouquet, that our consumers are willing to pay an increasingly large amount for that. So I think that really education and an understanding of what you are putting into this product… And the local elements are going to continue to help us grow this market in the one minute that remains.
The Enterprise Budgets and Closing
We want you to know that we already have the budgets that are accessible and out there. So as Celeste said, these are based originally on visits with growers on our own field trial data, but our Tennessee growers have also been reviewers and ground truthers for us as we put these budgets together. So right now we have five warm season annuals that are available on our website there. So we put the QR code. so that y’all can have access to these. And of course, as you’re using them, as you’re working with them, we would love to hear any feedback that you might have or any experience, any additions. And we’re excited about the opportunity to maybe add some more plants to our palette, moving forward, and expand the selection of ready-to-use tools. So I believe that is in fact the last slide that we have.
So Celeste may have to hop off and go talk about turfgrass here, but I’m going to hang on, and if there’s any questions that you have or any ideas or thoughts or suggestions… We just really appreciate the opportunity to engage with y’all and are excited to listen to the rest of the speakers this morning. So Bethany, I’ll turn it back over to you.
Questions and Answers
Leaf-Footed Bugs on Sunflowers
Gabrielle LaTora: All right. Thank you, Celeste and Natalie. My name is Gabrielle LaTora. I’m an agriculture and natural resources agent in Fulton County, Georgia. And we really appreciate y’all’s time today. And we have one question in our chat. My sunflowers are getting hammered by that gnarly leaf-footed army tank stinky bug. Any organic suggestions for getting those off my sunflowers?
Celeste Scott: I can jump in there if y’all want me to try to fill that question. So I feel like you have a few options. However, again, remember how I referenced the majority of our insect feeding damage that I was seeing on sunflowers was primarily on foliage. So if we are harvesting those blooms at the appropriate time, your petals shouldn’t even actually be fully expanded yet. So hopefully if we’re harvesting those flowers at the right time… Even if there are pest insects in your field, we can forgo any types of treatments if we are harvesting those flowers early enough. However, if you do feel like that insect pressure is heavy enough that it warrants some kind of control. You can always look into the application of things like horticultural oils, insecticidal soaps.
But with that comes the knowledge that you’re going to have to get excellent coverage to have efficient control using those types of products. They also have little to no residual in your field. So that’s something that would have to be applied pretty regularly, obviously following all of your label recommendations. And also being cautious of temperature, because like it’s warm season, right? And those products can cause phytotoxic issues sometimes. Okay. One more question if you want to.
Where to Start, and What to Plant
Gabrielle LaTora: Thank you, Celeste. We’ve got one more question in the chat. Jennifer says, I’m starting some cut flowers in middle Georgia this year. What is a reasonable size of a garden to start with? We definitely want to start small and grow, but not sure where to start what to start with.
Celeste Scott: Yeah, so like I mentioned, warm season cut flowers are the gateway starter for folks who are looking to get into cut flower production. The majority of them are easy to grow from seeds, so it’s going to fit a lot of different setups, whether you’re trying to start transplants indoors, which is what we did for our trials because we needed to be certain of plant population counts to make sure that our data was correct. However, I know a lot of our growers direct seed warm season annuals. So I would suggest to have a good kind of combination of that filler foliage and focal. Zinnias are a great start. Celosia, you saw from our presentation, depending on what types of cultivars you can use, can serve as focals or fillers. I love gomphrena for a nice light filler, but it can be time consuming to harvest, so keep that in mind if you are putting that into your calculations.
I love Frosted Explosion, it is an annual panicum grass, great for foliage and filler. We trialed some ornamental millets that were really fun. Once you get later into the autumn season, those can cause a lot of beautiful contrast and different movement in your arrangements. And then basil, I love using all different types of basil for foliage fillers, but again… You’ve got to be careful when you’re harvesting those. If you harvest too early before those stems begin to feel woody, you’re gonna get a lot of wilting and no matter what your post-harvest handling methods are, those are not going to revive for you. So harvest timing is important. But those would be some places I would start.
Natalie Bumgarner: And I was going to say, Celeste, our budgets are set up to grow multiple crops. Now we’re not saying that they should all be grown in equal quantity, but the budgets are set up to grow, what, a quarter of an acre together, but representing five different cultivars with the concept that nobody needs an acre of zinnias as the beginning to start.
Celeste Scott: Yes, definitely. Thanks for adding that. They definitely play well together. So you can mix and match all those pieces of those warm season budgets to put together that quarter of an acre. Big picture.
Gabrielle LaTora: Perfect, thank y’all so much.
Transcript processed for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / Cut Flower Symposium Archives
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1), GTBOP_Transcript_2026-07-23_BumgarnerScottUTResearch.srt (402 blocks)
Bethany Harris speaks in one block only, so the proof script’s label stripper, which needs two occurrences of a name, leaves her label in the SRT text stream. Her line therefore keeps its inline label instead of a bold speaker label. Every other speaker carries a bold label.