Where It Really Began

Long before Fox Cottage Farm existed, there was another garden.

My grandfather kept a rose garden in upstate New York, and when I was little I loved following him through the rows while he inspected each bloom like it mattered. He wore welding clothes, and we were both usually covered in dirt by the time we finished walking through the beds. I remember the sun on my face, the smell of the soil, and the quiet rhythm of him tending those roses with so much care.

Afterward we would sit at the kitchen table and share a can of sardines and a beer. I was allowed a couple of sips, and it's a memory I cherish with him.

There was nothing glamorous about those afternoons. But there was something deeply grounding about them.

That garden was where I first learned that tending something living can anchor a person. It was where I learned patience, rhythm, and the quiet satisfaction that comes from caring for something over time.

At the time it was just a childhood memory. I had no idea that garden would become a thread running through the rest of my life — something I would return to again and again during the hardest seasons.

The Seasons of Fox Cottage Farm

Fox Cottage Farm was not built during an easy chapter of my life.

It came after nearly a decade of seasons that reshaped everything I thought my life would look like.

When people see the flowers now — the dahlias, the bouquets, the rows of blooms stretching across the field — it can look idyllic. Romantic, even. A flower farm in New England. The kind of life people imagine when they talk about slowing down or living closer to the land.

But Fox Cottage Farm didn’t grow out of ease.

It grew out of endurance, grief, and the slow rebuilding that happens when life dismantles the version of the future you thought you were walking toward.

And for me, that dismantling began with a medical conversation that changed everything.

The News That Changed Everything

When I learned I carried the BRCA gene mutation, the future suddenly came with numbers attached to it.

Risk percentages. Preventive options. Statistics that quietly rearrange the way you think about your own body and your future.

I was faced with decisions that most people never imagine having to make — preventive surgeries, removing healthy organs in order to reduce the chance of cancer later.

Eventually the conversation turned to the heaviest decision of all: removing my uterus and ovaries.

There was no version of that decision that felt like a win. Only the moment when you decide which hard you are willing to live with.

Do nothing and hope cancer never comes.

Or remove parts of your body to lower the risk.

I chose the surgeries.

But decisions like that do not exist in isolation. They ripple through everything — your identity, your relationship with your body, and often your relationships with the people closest to you.

In my case, the medical decisions meant to protect my future also became part of the unraveling of my marriage.

When it came time to remove my uterus and ovaries — a decision that would put me into surgical menopause — the weight of everything we were navigating became too much.

Sometimes life doesn’t collapse all at once.

Sometimes it fractures slowly, until one day you look around and realize the life you thought you were building is no longer standing.

The Dogs Who Carried Me Through

During those years, my dogs were everything to me.

Anyone who has had a dog that truly understands them knows what I mean. They aren’t just pets. They’re companions, protectors, and witnesses to your life.

My German shepherds were my shadow through those early years of navigating the BRCA diagnosis. They were there through the medical decisions, through the unraveling of my marriage, and through the long walks where I tried to make sense of a life that suddenly looked very different than the one I had imagined.

One of them — Adicous — was my heart dog. He seemed to understand me in a way that went beyond words.

Audelina was our wild girl — playful, mischievous, always full of life.

Losing her happened suddenly.

Blood cancer.

And the timing could not have been more surreal. It was the same weekend the world shut down for COVID.

I remember standing in the emergency vet clinic as everything around us was beginning to close. The world felt like it was collapsing inward, and in that moment we had to say goodbye to a dog who had walked beside me through so much.

We went home to a silent house.

The quiet was overwhelming.

A Small Gesture That Meant More

When I went to pick up Audelina’s ashes, the emergency vet handed me a small envelope. Inside it was a packet of wildflower seeds. 

At the time it felt like a simple gesture of kindness. But it stayed with me.

I had already been gardening — roses, peonies, and dahlias were growing in the yard — but something about that small act brought me back to the deeper rhythm of the garden.

It reminded me of my grandfather’s roses.

Of the calm that exists in a garden.

Of the quiet harmony of tending something living.

So I planted them.

Not because I had a plan, but because I needed something alive to care for while everything else in my life felt like it was unraveling.

Every morning I went outside to check on them.

Water them. Watch them. See what had changed overnight.

In a world that suddenly felt frozen in uncertainty, the garden kept moving forward.

The sun still rose. The soil still warmed. Life kept growing.

And slowly, almost without realizing it, tending those flowers began to steady me again.

Starting Over

Not long after all of this, my marriage ended.

Divorce is a strange kind of grief because it isn’t just the loss of a relationship — it’s the loss of a future you once imagined very clearly. The house, the holidays, the everyday rhythms of a life you thought you were building together.

At the same time, another realization was quietly settling in.

Motherhood, something I had once assumed would be part of my life, was no longer certain. And eventually it became something else entirely — final.

That kind of realization doesn’t arrive all at once. It unfolds slowly, and with it comes a quiet kind of mourning for the life you once pictured.

Eventually I made the decision to leave and start over.

In the middle of a pandemic.

I moved to Portsmouth, New Hampshire — a town where I didn’t know a single person.

Everything was shut down. There were no gatherings, no easy ways to meet people, and no family nearby to help. I had just left my old life behind and suddenly found myself in a quiet apartment in a new place, trying to figure out what came next.

Three weeks after moving, I had to say goodbye to Adicous. It gutted me.

Losing him felt like the final thread tying me to my old life had been cut.

If you’ve ever moved somewhere new as an adult, you know how disorienting it can be. Doing it during COVID added another layer of isolation.

What I missed most during that time was the garden.

I missed the rhythm of it. The calm. The way time slows down when your hands are in the soil.

The garden had become my place of peace, my comfort, my way of making sense of difficult seasons.

And suddenly it was gone.

Eventually Life Began to Shift Again

Eventually life began to shift again.

Not all at once, and not in dramatic ways, but slowly — the way most real change happens.

I met my boyfriend, and over time the quiet life I had been trying to rebuild began to feel a little less uncertain.

When we decided to move in together, I found myself doing what I always seem to do when I arrive somewhere new: I started looking at the yard and imagining what it could become.

Where the light fell in the afternoon.

Where the soil might be good enough to plant something.

Where a garden might take root.

So I started planting again.

At first it was small — a few beds, some familiar flowers. But the garden grew quickly, the way gardens tend to do when someone falls back in love with the rhythm of tending them.

Dahlias multiplied. Peonies expanded. And roses — always roses — found their way back in as well. Before long the yard had become something more than just a garden. It had become Fox Cottage Farm.

What started as a way to reconnect with something that had always steadied me slowly grew into something I wanted to share with other people.

Flowers for neighbors. Bouquets for pop-ups. Dahlias that seemed to multiply every year.

Eventually that small backyard garden led to something I never could have imagined when I first planted those flowers again — the creation of the dahlia field at Bird Dog Cider.

What began as a personal return to the garden became something much bigger.

A place where people could come walk through the flowers, cut their own stems, and experience the same calm that gardening had given me during some of the hardest years of my life.

Why Dahlias (and Peonies)

Over time, dahlias became the center of the garden.

Not because they were the only flowers I grew, but because they seemed to mirror resilience so perfectly.

Every fall they are cut back to nothing, dug up, and divided into tubers that spend the winter stored in darkness. To someone unfamiliar with them, they look lifeless.

But everything they need to grow again is still there, quietly waiting.

That image stayed with me.

Because strength, I realized, is often subterranean. It’s the quiet rebuilding that happens when no one is watching — the slow process of learning how to begin again.

But dahlias were never the whole garden.

Peonies had been there for years, returning each spring with the same steady reliability. And roses, of course — I still grow more than fifty roses today, mostly for my own enjoyment.

That part of the garden feels like a continuation of where this story truly began, back in my grandfather’s rose garden, where I first learned that tending flowers could anchor a life.

Each of these flowers carries something different.

Peonies remind me of patience.

Dahlias remind me of resilience.

And roses remind me where it all started. 🫶🏻