The Farmers and Florist

Sara Payne and Erik Wardenaar are the owners of Flutterby Flower Farm. Married since 1993, they met at speedskating camp in Couderay, Wisconsin, when Erik was a graduate student at University of Minnesota in plant ecology and Sara was working in the field of employee benefits in Minneapolis. But before that….

Sara grew up in the Los Angeles area, although city life never really agreed with her. She has memories of just wanting to grow carrots but being thwarted by adobe clay soil and water shortages. Finishing high school at an international school in Wales, U.K., Sara loved British gardens but didn’t have a chance to do her first planting until she was in college in Middlebury, Vermont. There, surrounded by beautiful mountains and dairy farms, she planted spring flower bulbs and experienced the magic. Graduate studies took her to the farmlands of Indiana, and once done with her studies (library and information science), she relocated to Minneapolis, Minnesota. After purchasing her first home, Sara planted every last centimeter/inch of her yard and became a Master Gardener for Hennepin County to further and share her knowledge. The next home (along with Erik) had lots more yard to plant, though much of it shady, and she learned how to adjust her flower-growing visions to the environmental constraints. Before relocating to Northfield, Sara focused her career on employee benefits ERISA compliance and human resources management.

At Flutterby Flowers, Sara is a farmer/florist who focuses on: business management; marketing; website creation and management; photography and graphics; creative & product development; day-to-day floriculture; and all floral arrangements.

Erik was born and raised in the province of Noord Holland in the Netherlands. He spent an idyllic childhood playing in the Dutch farm fields and shores of a small village on the IJsselmeer (formerly the Zuiderzee) and enjoying full access to his father’s workshop and tools. He, his siblings, and friends built everything from castles to sailboats to functional roller coasters before reaching teen years. His home was built (by his father) on the site of a former orchard, and Erik was involved early in helping in the garden, and later, in the greenhouses of neighboring Dutch farms. He studied at the University of Amsterdam for both undergraduate and graduate studies in biology. He came to Minnesota many years ago for additional graduate studies in plant ecology, with no intention of staying, until he met Sara at speedskating camp.

At Flutterby Flowers, Erik is the farmer in charge of: day-to-day field operations; infrastructure development & construction; most of the heavy labor; as well as partnering with Sara in floriculture. He also works on our home restoration, woodworking and other projects for ourselves and others. When not doing any of the above, he often can be found ice-speedskating (specializing in 50 km distance) or inline-speedskating, depending on the season.

Sara and Erik are parents of an amazing young adult, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar, a Carleton College grad, who provides technical, videography, drone and still photography consultation to the farm when not busy with his work as an astronomy visualization scientist. He works on Milky Way mapping projects as part of the European Space Agency (ESA) Gaia project— an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Check out his work here!