Slow Flowers Podcast

Episode 415: Floral design takes a botanical journey with Sylvia Lukach of Cape Lily, plus our State Focus: New York

08.21.2019 - By Debra PrinzingPlay

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Sylvia Lukach of Cape Lily,

sharing her love of South African flora with lovers of flowers and travel

This wasn't entirely planned but it turns out, we have two New York-based guests this week.

Our first featured guest comes by way of South Africa, Harlem and lower Hudson Valley, Sylvia Lukach of Cape Lily. Our second guest is Charles Sherman of North Fork Flower Farm in Orient, New York, who appears as part of the 2019 – Fifty States of Slow Flowers series. Listen for my great conversation with Charles in the second portion of this episode.

A botanical display from Cape Lily's first botanical excursion to South Africa

Sylvia and I first connected when I hosted a Slow Flowers Upstate New York Meet-up in Hudson, New York about three years ago. She traveled about two hours north of her home and studio in New York City's Harlem neighborhood to join the gathering of Hudson Valley flower farmers, farmer-florists and other designers like herself -- a group that loosely called themselves the Hudson Valley Flower Growers Network. We discussed some of the emerging issues facing Manhattan and Brooklyn-based wedding and event florists like Sylvia and the growers whose flowers they so eagerly source. Issues like transportation, special ordering, access to markets and more.

It's a theme that continues today and you may have listened to my conversation just a few weeks ago with Molly Culver of Molly Oliver Flowers in Brooklyn -- we addressed the same issues and Molly's sourcing goals, successes and challenges.

Two floral collaborations that reflect Sylvia's Harlem, New York, ties with artists and makers.

Sylvia and I continued a friendship when Cape Lily joined Slow Flowers and after we reunited just months later at the first Whidbey Flower Workshop in 2017, hosted by Tobey Nelson. There, during our introductions and the creative writing exercises I led, it emerged that Sylvia dreamed of blending her South African heritage, her love of South African floral, and her love of travel into an unique brand for her business Cape Lily.

Since then, Sylvia has developed a studio-based floral enterprise serving New York City, Westchester County, where she now lives, and the Hudson Valley wedding and event marketplace. And she led her first botanical journey for Cape Lily -- a floral-themed tour with Susan Mcleary to South Africa last fall.

Beautiful creations from the Sue Mcleary workshop during Cape Lily's South African botanical excursion

I wanted to invite Sylvia onto the Slow

Flowers Podcast to share her story and to discuss how she has indeed zeroed in

on the unique brand attributes of Cape Lily. If you're at a similar place in

your own floral enterprise -- seeking a way to highlight your singular story

and distinct place in the marketplace -- I know that Sylvia's narrative will be

inspiring.

Sue Mcleary joined Sylvia as floral design instructor. Photography (c) Heather Saunders

Sylvia wrote a beautiful essay for our Slow Flowers Journal online magazine called "An African Slow Flowers Story," which we published in December 2017. Its opening lines begin as follows:

Florists, flower farmers; local South African designers + North American students. They all came together for a love of flowers, place, friendship.

I grew up in a small coastal town in South Africa, Plettenberg Bay, in an area called the Garden Route, where fynbos, a distinct aromatic indigenous shrubland, flows down the mountains and hovers on the sand dunes along the ocean. I would run up the hill in my Wellies (for protection from snakes) to harvest some of the pride of the...

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