Photo courtesy of La Terre Farm
Flowers
Flowers at La Terre Farm.
When Teri Wyly decided to start a flower farm, after ending her forty-year career as an environmental attorney, she had never grown anything before. “I was never a gardener. In fact, I used to pay a service to keep the plants alive in my office,” Wyly laughed.
You’d never know it to visit the 500 lush acres of her property, La Terre Farm in Kiln, Mississippi. Named for the nearby Bayou La Terre, what was once virgin timberland is now crisscrossed by walking trails, dotted with artesian-fed ponds, and proffering fresh flowers and greenery for the local community. The aptronym La Terre translates from French to “the earth,” connecting the environmental passions that directed Wyly’s first career to her desire for communion with it, which inspired her second.
Operating the farm with her son Connor, Wyly has endeared herself to their Coastal Mississippi neighbors not only with a CSA-type flower subscription but by hosting agrotourism events ranging from mother/daughter teas to yoga wellness retreats, from flower arranging workshops to open-air concerts and school field trips. Today, they also take their flower trailer off site for a build-your-own-bouquet experience at baby showers, farm-to-table dinners, and other events.
The origins of the enterprise are a bit serendipitous. It began more than forty years ago when Wyly’s car broke down right in front of a Bay St. Louis real estate office. She went in to call a mechanic, and while waiting on repairs, inquired about any local farmland for sale. “The agent showed us a VHS tape of a timber farm twenty minutes away in Kiln,” Wyly said. “It was unique property with a spring-fed creek, rolling hills, and old-growth oaks and magnolias,”—not to mention a legacy as the rumored site of high-quality moonshine stills in a county once known as “The Moonshine Capital.”
“We were immediately smitten,” she said. “We bought it that afternoon.”
The original property consisted of eighty acres of timberland. As contiguous land came up for sale, they bought it as well and continued to build onto their farm. Wyly says that while her friends’ husbands spent weekends on the golf course, her husband, “Bubba,” a fellow attorney, spent his on the farm. “It would be time to pay tuition for one of the kids and I’d wonder where all the money had gone,” she said. “Then, I’d find out Bubba had purchased another fifty acres.” She nicknamed his tractor “Peaches” and laughs about driving to the farm to pull him off of “her” so he could get ready for weekend social engagements. “You can take the boy off the farm, but you can’t take the farm out of the boy,” Wyly said.
In late 2021, as Wyly was preparing for retirement, she began wondering what the next chapter of her life would look like. “One day, Connor said, ‘We’re farmers. We have these 500 acres. Why don’t we farm?’” Wyly remembers. Until that point, they’d only harvested timber from the property. “Bubba’s family are row-crop farmers in North Louisiana, but Connor and I had certainly never farmed. I told him to do some research and pictured him heading to the library to make his way through the Dewey Decimal system.”
Photo courtesy of La Terre Farms.
Teri Wyly and her son Connor Wyly
Teri Wyly and her son Connor Wyly, owners of La Terre Farms.
Instead, Connor utilized the search bar on Google. A few hours later, he had the answer—cut flowers. By February 1, 2022, they’d signed a contract to build their barn. By April 1, they’d broken ground on what they call “the event house.” The pandemic shutdown was still in effect, so the two would-be flower farmers began taking classes online. “We did a farmer’s workshop and a floret class,” Wyly said. “But it was all online, so it was strictly academic. We found out the hard way that many of the flowers we’d studied won’t grow in the heat and humidity of Coastal Mississippi.” So, they harvested what they had aplenty—slash pines, cedar, magnolias, and holly—and constructed garlands and wreaths as their first products.
Wyly considers that first year a “mulligan.” They grew a few sunflowers, but they were too tall and the stems too thick. When they tried their hand at cold-weather flowers, Wyly decided the seedlings were too cold and needed to be mulched. They did not. “We planted bachelor buttons, poppies, snapdragons, delphinium, carnations, and ranunculus. I mulched them and they all died.”
“Our overarching theme is fresh and local. We’re looking forward to seeing where that will take us.” —Teri Wyly
That’s when a lot of folks would have given up. But Wyly and Connor pressed on into year two. They started taking the flowers they had managed to grow to local farmers markets. But it was in dribs and drabs, as they were ready. Then, they began cold calling New Orleans florists. “We’d show up with a bucket of flowers and some native greenery and say, ‘Here, play with these.’ We weren’t out the door before we had an order.” Before they knew it, they were supplying fresh flowers and greenery to local hotels and high-end restaurants as well.
Their motto was “Grown, Not Flown” to emphasize the freshness of the flowers. But that freshness turned out to be a double-edged sword. “The point of buying flowers locally is that they didn’t spend weeks getting to you,” Wyly said. “You could buy flowers today that were in the field yesterday. But that also meant they’d stay fresh so long that you didn’t need to buy more for some time.” Farmers market patrons would tell them excitedly that they didn’t need flowers or greenery this week because the ones they had bought the previous week still looked great.
[Read this: Nightshade Flower Farm—Becca Greaney’s blooming on Rabbits Street]
Still, the flower farm was off and, if not running, at least moving forward. Wyly and Connor hit a spark when they expanded the agrotourism side of the business. “’Pivot’ became our favorite word,” Wyly said. “At the end of each year, we’d say, ‘Well, this seemed to work but this definitely did not!’ Eventually, agrotourism began to pay the light bill.”
Sourdough bread-making classes were popular, especially when followed by a stroll around the farm. Wyly designed a Mardi Gras Mask and Mocktails class. In October, they welcomed families to the farm for pumpkin picking. Come Christmas, girlfriend groups began booking up the wreath-making classes. They hosted local chefs for farm-to-table style dinners, with all the floral arrangements grown onsite. “People seem to love the idea of you-pick-it, so we want to offer more of that,” Wyly said. “And we want to start incorporating picnics on the farm.”
Recently, there was another pivot—perhaps the biggest one yet. Last year, the Wylys sold the home in Bay St. Louis where they’d lived for forty years and moved into the event house at La Terre. “We were right downtown in the Bay and, while we welcome all the revitalization, it’s not the quiet, little town we used to know,” Wyly said. Since moving to the farm fulltime, Wyly and Connor have begun drawing up plans for a new venue, a French greenhouse designed specifically for classes, workshops, and dinners. “We also love the idea of farm-to-table events set right out among the flowers on the farm,” Wyly said. “And we have many lovely spots for bridal and engagement photo shoots.”
Other ideas in the works include farm days where families can come hike the trails, fish in the ponds, stroll the creek, commune with the farm animals (including Joe Burrow, the donkey), pick their own sunflowers and blueberries, then go home with local honey from the apiary and eggs from the resident free-range chickens. “Our overarching theme is fresh and local,” Wyly said. “We’re looking forward to seeing where that will take us.” laterrefarms.com.
