Who We Are

     One of my earliest memories is sitting on thick green grass on a warm summer day decorating our chain link fence with dandelion curls. My sisters and I would snip off a length of dandelion stem and cut into the end until it was fringed, then plunk it into a cup of cold water. The tiny ends would curl into a pretty little decorative ball.  It was like magic.  We would hook as many of the curls as our little fingers could make onto the wires of the fence.  We thought that it was beautiful.  I couldn’t have been more than three years old at the time.  The memory feels so serene, yet just over a year before that experience my family had been rocked with tragedy.  I have heard that a person’s character is shaped partly by the hardships that they face.  I believe it.  Just before my second birthday, my father was seriously injured at his work.  He was a lumberjack in the winter months and a tree fell on him.  His back was broken, paralyzing him below the ribcage and throwing my family into chaos!  Being the youngest of four little girls, I only vaguely remember the details.  But, I do remember the feelings of love and closeness with my mom and sisters and various relatives as we all banded together to take care of each other.  My mother spent months going back and forth between us and the hospital, trying to nurture her broken husband and her little girls.  

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     My parents were amazingly resilient, and somehow we emerged from that experience whole and healthy.  My father was in a wheelchair of course, but since I can barely remember him any other way, it just seemed normal to me. All of my childhood was spent in the country.  We lived on an acre of land in Southeastern Idaho surrounded by wheat and potato fields. A few miles to our north lay a ridge of the Teton mountains and the Snake River that runs along the mountain base.  The strength and resilience of my parents that brought us through my father’s accident was passed onto us girls through my parents' determination to grow our character through hard work.  As kids we didn’t appreciate this much.  As my father was in a wheelchair, he couldn’t do much of the physical labor usually done by fathers, so we had to help our mom do a lot of heavy work.  We mowed lawn, hauled dirt and sod, tilled, planted and harvested the garden, trimmed trees, hauled wood, and everything that you can imagine that needed to be done on an acre of country property.  

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     My mother was immaculate and talented with design.  She expressed much of her creative energy in our yard and garden, making it beautiful and serene. It was her refuge and became mine as well. As children, my sisters and I worked beside her for hours and hours during each spring, summer, and fall, planting every kind of vegetable imaginable, in topsoil so deep that I didn’t know any other kind of soil existed.  Then there were the flowers.  They were the jewels of the garden. There was a large patch of peonies blooming at the far edge of the east vegetable garden in sight of a thriving clematis that seemed to produce a blanket of royal purple blossoms all summer.  I remember playing princess under a canopy of Russian olive trees.  They were always well trimmed, and when they bloomed, the scent was rich and sweet and filled the yard with their amazing aroma.  I remember feeling a deep sense of peace there as I worked and played among the trees and flowers, whether it was filling buckets with red juicy raspberries, or playing make believe in the lush beauty that my mother had created. We had helped her of course, but I’m not sure that it was beautiful because of, or in spite of, our efforts. We were so young.  

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     Overall, I had a rich childhood and learned to appreciate the beauty that hard work can create.  I married after my first year of college.  At my first opportunity, when we bought our first little home, I wanted to plant flowers.  My husband and I created lots of flower beds in our tiny little yard.  He was certain that straight lines were best, but I was even more certain that we needed curves.  I won and we made them curvy. There were many bushes and flowers but the petunias that we grew in the beds were so profuse that I was constantly cutting them back so that they wouldn’t take over the lawn and sidewalk.  They were gorgeous and I was in love with the flowers and with the whole process of creating, planting, and growing.  We moved three more times while my sweetheart was finishing his schooling and the trend continued.  Each new place we lived was another opportunity to create a beautiful garden.  We ended up here in Utah on a quaint little property next to Stansbury Lake where, again, my yard and garden became a true joy and a peaceful retreat, and like my mother, it was my favorite place to express the creative energy that constantly bubbles out of me.

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     In 2011 my father passed away.  It felt like the foundation of our family had crumbled.  He was the quiet support that glued us all together.  Then, six years later, my mom passed away from cancer and once again, we all felt cheated.  They were too young.  But, as I reflect on them and what they taught me, I want to continue their legacy.  They were survivors and they knew how to create a beautiful life in spite of, and maybe because of, their trials.  They weren’t wealthy by any means, but they managed to save enough to leave my sisters and me a small inheritance.  I wanted to use mine for something that would remind me of them, so I bought five acres of untouched ground against the Oquirrh mountains in East Erda, Utah.  I came across the concept of a flower farm a few years before we built our current home, in about 2019.  It became the dream that I never knew I had.  It has been consuming my thoughts ever since and I have fallen in love with the idea.  In fact, I am giddy about the whole project.  We have been working hard for the last few years to make it a reality.  We have about an acre of cut flowers  that we grow, with more than fifty varieties of blooms and stems planned.  

 

     Kindrid is my given name.  The name is derived from the word Kindred.  It refers to family and to like minds and character.  I named our little farm Kindrid Blooms to pay tribute to my parents.  Every bloom and stem that we grow will remind me of them and that beauty is created from love, hard work, and perseverance.

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- Kindy (Kindrid) Griffeth, owner of the Kindrid Blooms farm