Our Story
We love to connect people with nature through our British, seasonal flowers. If you appreciate real flowers that make the heart sing like we do, you’re in the right place!
Before MeadowSweet Posies began, Sophie Townsend was a wedding florist in London. But the more she worked with out-of-season flowers flown thousands of “flower miles” to reach the UK, the more she thought there had to be a better way. Over 85% of the flowers used here are imported, selected for longevity and travel rather than scent, character or connection to the seasons.
Sophie believed there was a greater beauty in real flowers, grown close to home, shaped by the British weather, and full of natural beauty and scent.
So in 2016, she created MeadowSweet Posies, the first online flower subscription service to use British-grown flowers and foliage all year round. The business was named after her two-year-old daughter, Meadow (who was, of course, also very sweet).
What started in family gardens in Dorset and Surrey and a flower plot in the New Forest with Sophie and her wonderfully green-fingered mum, then grew into partnerships with artisan growers and British flower farms in Cornwall and Lincolnshire.
Working with British flowers year round isn’t always the easiest route, but it is the most rewarding. It means your posy reflects the moment: the first hopeful tulips of spring, the frothy abundance of summer, the rich textures of autumn, the quiet beauty of winter. Sophie believes that when you connect with seasonal flowers, you connect more deeply with nature, and when we feel that connection, we’re more likely to care for it.
If you'd like to find out a bit more about our (often, wibbly) journey to where we are now, do read on...
1. Start with one Earthy Mother
Sophie knows how lucky she is to have a Mum like hers, one who knows the importance of the natural world, and how to share it with her, and more recently with her children.
2. A Love of Nature
Born in the 70s, Sophie's childhood was spent outside (as in, she was pretty much banned from being inside), sipping Ribena with her brother in their oak tree, making dens in the bracken, running about with walkie-talkies on Bisley Common, camping in the New Forest, learning bushcraft with The Woodcraft Folk, and sitting still with mum badgerwatching.
3. Flowers
Sophie’s love of nature led to her study Ecology, move to New Zealand and work as a florist at the Devonport Flower Barrow.
4. Animals
Then she got a job as a zookeeper at Auckland Zoo (this is Nisha enjoying some kitten milk) and then a number of wildlife conservation roles in the UK and Africa. Later she took a masters in Sustainability to work out how people could become part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
5. Family Values
Starting her family, Sophie left the animals and returned to flowers as a wedding florist in London. She loved the early morning starts at Covent Garden market and seeing how flowers brought so much joy. But then came...
6. Rainbow roses!
In 2024 the family moved to the South Coast (to be by the New Forest and the sea) and Sophie’s first bride wanted rainbow roses. The bride gets what the bride wants (everyone knows that) but, for Sophie, these roses epitomised all that was wrong about the UK cut flower industry, flooded with imported flowers - seasonless, scentless, tedious.
7. Can You Dig It?
As luck would have it, Sophie’s Mum was a lifelong-greenfingered-wannabe-market-gardener, so Sophie had no quarms putting her straight to work growing flowers to enhance what she could buy at the wholesalers. Growing in both their gardens, and then in a spare bit of land (thanks Martyn), the locally-grown additions to her arrangements meant more scent, more character, more charm and more meaning.
8. Working Round Family Life
But with three young children to look after, school holidays were getting increasingly busy. Booking up for weddings no longer seemed like a good idea. Sophie was an early Hello Fresh food box convert, and she had a lightbulb moment. How about a ‘meals on wheels’ subscription service, but not for food but for flowers. And could it be possible to only use British grown flowers all year round?
She asked her friends and family to choose a business name, from ideas including Sophie’s Posies, Rosie Posie and MeadowSweet, named after a wildflower and also her two-year old daughter, Meadow. MeadowSweet got the most votes. The business, MeadowSweet Posies, was registered in April 2016.
9. The Packaging Faux-Pax
Sophie developed a new plastic, foldable, reusable vase. With her background in sustainability, she decided it was the best eco-friendly option - low energy to produce, easy to transport, reusable, reyclable. She even got the design registered with the IPO.
The vases worked well for a while - although some customers complained they fell over if they didn't put water in them (and presumably the flowers complained about that too).
10. The first MeadowSweet Posy
This is the first ever posy delivered to MeadowSweet's first ever local subscription customer in the foldable plastic vase.
11. The Garage
In the early years, Sophie worked out of her garage. Funny lighting. Hot in the summer, freezing in the winter.
12. A New Forest Cutting Garden
In 2018 Sophie was invited to grow in an idyllic New Forest garden of another very kind person called Lou. The whole family got involved this time.
13. #plasticfree
But then the world decided single-use plastic was a bad idea. Sophie's vases were reusable but were her customers reusing them or throwing them away? Trying to explain the sustainability benefits of plastic vases didn't work very well, so it was time for a change. In 2022 she found a very nice British supplier and introduced a recycled-content glass jar made in the UK instead. And the jar didn't fall over if customers forgot to add water (but the flowers still got thirsty).
14. Sourcing year-round British flowers is a bit of a headache (to say the least)
Outside the main season, it's necessary to find other sources of British grown flowers and access flowers grown under glass. However, British flowers were virtually impossible to buy 'normally'. Nearly all the flowers sold in the markets, wholesalers and online are imported.
Established growers in Lincolnshire had exclusive purchase agreements in place with major supermarkets. Other artisan growers only grew in the peak season and, if they did have useful flowers, Sophie still had to drive all over the place to fetch them. Sophie experimented getting British flowers sent to her directly from a small handful of regional wholesalers in Cornwall and Lincolnshire. More often than not, if the flower boxes showed up at all, they were delivered upside down, propped up on their ends, left in full sun, or the cat sat on them! And don't get her started on the mad dashes to distant delivery hubs to try to locate wayward boxes.
15. She tried everything
In 2023, Sophie tried getting closer to the Lincolnshire flowers by fulfilling the orders from there, but it just seemed she was driving her flowers for hours on end to make them up in Lincolnshire before driving home again. Oh, and she tore a ligament in her thumb getting on a horse (the wrong way) so couldn't do the driving anyway. Her Mum stepped in (as usual) and saved the day with her electric car. In 2025, Sophie tried moving the fulfilment to Cornwall with the help of an established two-generation flower farm but found this did not remove the need to access Lincolnshire flowers.
16. Whatever next?
We are currently back in our spiritual home using our New Forest plot for the peak summer season and we hope we are close to finally finding the perfect place to make up our flower orders. Mum and I are still growing in our New Forest plot and we intend to continue to supplement the posies with what we grow alongside using flowers from the more established growers in Lincolnshire (aka 'Little Holland').
If you'd like to be part of our British flower movement, why not send one of our posies to someone you love (or that you like a lot) and help to spread the joy of British flowers a little bit further.
