A Room of One’s Own: life on Burnt Fen flower farm

With roughly 30,000 flowers to tend, Alfie Nickerson, the founder of Norfolk-based growers Burnt Fen Flowers, has his hands full – often of resplendently vibrant seasonal flowers of all shapes, shades and sizes. Alfie has been running Burnt Fen for five years, on land that once belonged to his grandfather. “It was grassland, essentially,” he tells Inigo. “Each year since then we’ve expanded on it. We plough it up and then put around 40 tons of muck on it. Then we just try and plant as many plants as we can. There’s a lot to do.”

The farm offers a weekly subscription service and supplies British-grown stems to a roster of high-profile clients. And yet, for now, it remains a relatively small and rotating operation that includes florists, volunteers, friends and family members. In many ways, it’s a family affair: even the ply-clad cabin at the centre of the action was designed and built by Alfie’s interior designer brother and architect father.

Alfie cut his teeth as a gardener in London, where he grew up, before setting up shop in Burnt Fen. “I worked in London for six years before I thought: I’ve done this long enough to either take it seriously or go elsewhere and start something new. I just thought: ‘What do I really like about being a gardener?’ I realised I enjoyed growing things from seed all the way to flower. I was lucky to have the space up in Norfolk.”

Initially, Alfie volunteered at Fern Verrow – Jane Scotter’s revered biodynamic farm in Herefordshire. “At first, I thought it was going to be like a hobby,” he admits. “I didn’t even really want to sell flowers. I thought it would be a weekend thing where I come up and you know, eat a few vegetables and have a nice time.” Gradually, Alfie found he was spending less time in London, and more time with his hands in the Norfolk soil.

As the business began to blossom, Alfie realised he needed an indoor base. “My dad’s an architect, my brother an interior designer, so they were pretty on it when it came to the cabin,” Alfie explains. “They were like: ‘let’s get this thing right and let’s get this thing done.’ A lot of the materials that we used were things that were going to be discarded that my dad pulled off old jobs. My brother got the floorboards from an old hospital in Manchester –almost everything is recycled, apart from the birch ply that lines the inside.”

Designed by local craftsman Jack Coleman, there is a utility to the space that doesn’t come at the cost of beauty. “It was built for a very specific purpose,” says Alfie. “The windows are positioned in a spot that looks out over the patch … And even the table was built by us from a piece of 600-year-old oak. We made it slightly higher so it can be used as a workbench. We use every single inch of the space.”

The cabin is encompassed by the plants that will eventually be harvested and brought inside for packaging. Just as there’s a cyclicality to the process of growing, there is a rhythm to life inside the cabin. “On Wednesdays, we pick all the flowers and store them at the cabin. On Thursday, we pack them all up. So there are two big cabin days. Music is on 24/7 … At the moment, it’s quite a lot of country – with the occasional rap banger to get everyone pumped up.”

Trial and error play their part here at Burnt Fen. Sometimes, Alfie will discover that the less-than-consistent climate of Norfolk isn’t suited to a particular plant. There are other heartaches too: “Things might work amazingly well one year, and then don’t work as well the next. A rabbit might break in and eat all of the plants, or it rains at the wrong time and everything gets completely sodden, or there’s a frost at the wrong time. The flowers can be your best mates, but they can also be your biggest enemies.”

This year, Burnt Fen has embarked on a new venture: drying flowers, a process that also takes place in the cabin. “We always try to mix things up so we’re not doing the same each year,” Alfie explains. This too has been a learning curve: “It’s hard … if you put one mouldy one in the box, they’re all basically screwed!”

A particularly untroubling species has won Alfie’s affections this year, though: “I’m obsessed with ammobium at the moment,” he reveals. “You get so much out of it, and it also dries really well too, so it has a dual purpose. I’m very into growing flowers that you can do both with … There’s just so much waste in this game: imagine how many flowers end up on the floor because they were either too late, or it wasn’t the right time to cut them. Having flowers where you feel like you’re getting the most out of your time is very satisfying.”

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Burnt Fen Flowers