An Introduction

We are Rosita Schrock and LaRonda Schrock, children of the eighties.

We grew up pedaling our bright blue and yellow plastic “hot rods” at breakneck speed through the yard. Cap’n Crunch was big news and we listened to cassette tapes, not CD’s or iPods.

Our dear mother had large, bountiful gardens tended by plenty of field hands. And by field hands I mean us. We didn’t particularly like gardening, so it is as surprising to us as anyone that our garden is now bigger than Mom’s.  We had the happiest of childhoods in a large, well-cared for family, with a healthy side education in weed control.

If you like to divide things up by generations, we narrowly missed being Millennials and categorize ourselves carefully as Gen Xers.   If you like to divide things up by marital status, we are a couple of spinsters living dangerously. (All potential suitors may apply on our contact page.)   If you like to divide things up by religious affiliation, we love Jesus and owe Him our lives, and we are Anabaptist.  If you like to divide things up by experiences, we have lived abroad and in the deep south and traveled extensively and bought plane tickets like there is no tomorrow.  If you divide things up by day jobs, and not side hustles, we both work in our family business, custom kitchens.

There are lots of ways to divide things up, but maybe all you need to know, dear friend, is that we really like growing and designing with flowers. We are happy at the end of the day if somewhere along the way it involved armfuls of flowers and steaming cups of coffee, big dreams and impossible goals.

What’s in a name?

Root Design Co. became our OFFICIAL side hustle in 2015, after a decade of doing wedding flowers under the unofficial name of “those Schrock girls”.  (And when I said side hustle, what I really meant to say is that it has taken over our lives.)

But at least we made it official, right?

We weren’t quite sure what to call ourselves and our big dreams, but one September evening as we were planting heaps of peonies, we settled on Root Design Co.

We chose this name foremost because our bouquets are designed in root or seed form as we pour over seed catalogs and dahlia sites in the middle of winter.  It takes more careful planning than one would think to have a cohesive bouquet blooming simultaneously!

We also wanted to convey that the arrangements you see here are grown in our garden and foraged from the hills around us.  When we forage, we gather from thickets whose roots have grown long and have tangled with other trees and who have become as strong underground as they are above.

It’s a bit like this burgeoning farmer florist community, I think… long, gnarly roots forming a community of some wonderfully scrappy, generous souls. Flower farmers might just be the happiest leather-skinned folks on earth.   My kind of thicket.

Blog Goals

Our plan for this blog is to document the things we learn as we garden, and to invite you along for the ride.  You’ll probably see the guts and the glory.  You might even learn that this Instagram worthy operation is, most days, one loose bolt short of flying apart.

Because you know, farming can be a little bit heartbreaking and a lot exhausting.  But in the same breath, I can’t wait to tell you about those early misty mornings in the garden.  You should come see it for yourself.

While we will talk a lot about flowers on this blog, we have many other interests as well, and you may see bits and pieces of our non-flowery side, too.  Who can tell?

-Rosita & LaRonda  (pictured in pecking order)