Ashland, Missouri
“What’s that wild thang growin’ on the side of the road?” It was the question Mimo Davis fielded most frequently from customers during the four years she worked at a wild flower nursery. It’s chicory, a slender blue flower that only blooms for a day… It’s butterfly weed, a flat orange fan flower, she’d answer alternately, depending on what particular wild thing her clients were pointing to.
Mimo worked at the nursery during her masters program in horticulture at Lincoln University and for two years afterward. During that time, she had purchased 15 acres of land and planted her own garden using starts from the shop. She showed up at no event, barbecue or wedding, without an elaborate bouquet in hand to give the hosts.
“You have so much knowledge I can’t afford to pay you what you are worth,” her boss and wildflower mentor finally confessed. “You need to do something with your piece of land.”
Mimo was still just getting used to the idea of herself as a plant expert.
A social worker from New York City, she didn’t know she cared for green things until she visited her mom in Missouri on the occasion of a wedding in 1991. During her mom’s two week honeymoon, Mimo was charged with caring for the 132-plant rose garden that came with the house her mother, also a plant-lover, and the newly betrothed had just bought.
Mimo had a ball that fortnight, and returned to the city feeling burned out with the demanding work of keeping adolescents off the streets. So she packed up and moved down to Ashland, becoming her mom’s gardener for the summer. It took no more than three months for the sociologist to kill off every last rose bush, but Mimo had fun experimenting with the delicate beauties and learned what she needed to know about the flowers and about herself. She was bound to become a green thumb.
The flower lady now has five acres in a mix of perennials and annuals, fancy grasses, berry bushes, and fruit trees, with woods and open pasture on the rest of the land. She mixes standard high-end fare, such as larkspur, freesia and delphinium, with surprising elements like fruiting berry branches or acorn-studded oak twigs.
“I look at nature and if I think it’s beautiful I kind of know my customers well enough to know that they would think it’s beautiful,” she explained.
Mimo started the business she calls Wild Thang Farm, in honor of the place she grinded her horticultural teeth, in 1998. In that year, she heeded the nursery owner’s advice and started taking bouquets to the Columbia Farmers’ Market. Before long, Mimo had gotten up the nerve to take her best bouquet to the best florist in town. The presentation was a smash hit and word got around about her unique floral works of art.
Mimo now supplies 33 Missouri florists, two farmers’ markets, employs five employees and makes a living in agriculture with no outside income. Hers has become the largest cut flower business in the state.
While the nursery taught her all about growing specialty flowers, graduate school provided her with a vital personal connection to the university, and gave her the wherewithal to write grants. Mimo’s first grant was a simple application to the State Department of Health, which sought small businesses to employ people with mental health conditions.
The program was the incentive Mimo needed to transition from being a one-woman operation, a step she needed to take to grow the business to its current size. Her staff helps with everything from planting to harvesting to selling. Mimo even lets them in on the creative process of crafting bouquets.
The second grant she wrote was to the Missouri Department of Agriculture to build a low (five-foot tall) unheated hoop house. The structure Mimo designed herself, in concert with three additional heated greenhouses, extends her harvest from Valentine’s Day to Christmas, making production nearly year-round and hitting prime cut flower occasions.
Mimo is proud of her work and loves rural life. And with family and friends in New York, she still gets her fill of the city with several visits a year. She hesitates to draw parallels between her current and previous vocations, except one.
“Flowers are awful healing,” she reflects, adding that the indirect therapeutic effects of flowers are not too far from her direct intervention as a social worker to improve people’s lives. One of Mimo’s greatest satisfactions these days is chancing upon one of her own whimsical, vibrant works of art prominently displayed in a hospital, where just a little goes a very long way.