The busiest bee in town
- Francie Healy
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Picture this: You have three little boys under the age of five.
While you’re sleeping, a truck comes to your house in the middle of the night to deliver flowers ‒ boxes and boxes of flowers.
Early the next morning you open the boxes, unwrap each flower, take off all the foliage, cut them, and give them flower food. You place them in fresh water, in separate buckets, and from there into two fridges.
And then you start your day.
This is Emily Casselman, owner of Busy Bee Flowers in Westport. She has 13 weddings coming up in the next few months, and they are all relying on her for beautiful flowers.
Emily seems to do it all with ease. Fortunately, she has good family support. When she needs them, her husband, mother and sister all pitch in, as they did recently at the outdoor wedding of Lagois president, Jacob Kirst, and his wife, Sabrina.
That wedding, says Emily, “was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It was amazing. It was more flowers than you could ever imagine!”
They had an aisle of ferns and 400 white roses. They had multiple archways and many beautiful hanging baskets. Emily not only supplied the flowers. She also coordinated the wedding. She enjoyed that part of it so much that she’s considering adding wedding planning to Busy Bee’s services. “It really does tie in so well,” she says.
Every wedding is unique. Some people ask Emily to provide flowers for the whole wedding and reception. Some just want bouquets. Some want her to set up everything.
So Emily delivers the flowers, arranges the ceremony area, table and centrepieces. Sometimes she also goes back the next day to clean up rented items for their return.
She uses her SUV with the seats down and loads up buckets and boxes full of flowers. She doesn’t have a truck yet because her business, like her flowers, blossomed almost overnight. She’s hardly had a chance to catch her breath since she began Busy Bee Flowers a year ago.
It started because of her love of flowers, colour and design. She had been working as a dental assistant in Carleton Place for six years when she decided she wanted to be at home with her kids. She had gotten to know Colleen Kahrman, owner of Hidden Garden in Newboro and Westport, when Colleen did the flowers for Emily’s wedding in 2019.
“Colleen became my mentor,” Emily says. “She got me started and gave me all the tips. I couldn’t have done it without her. She was so lovely.” Colleen died earlier this year.
Emily began with little “pop up” flower sales in the lobby of The Cove Country Inn in Westport. She also made wreaths. She set up a roadside stand outside her home. “It was an honour system while I was getting my feet wet,” she says. When her husband worked at the now-closed Bank of Montreal in Westport, she would leave an arrangement there each week with her cards.
“And then,” she says, “word just kind of got around.”
Now she not only provides the flowers for weddings but for The Opinicon at Chaffey’s Lock, which uses Busy Bee flowers for the tables. She also does the flowers for funerals, but weddings are the events she loves.
There’s a lovely small-town romance to all of this. Emily’s mother, Maureen Price (with the beautiful smile), has been the much-loved manager of The Cove Country Inn for more than 40 years. Maureen met Emily’s father at The Cove when they were young and he was also working there.
The business has been a learning curve, but Emily loves all of it.
“You’ve got to plan,” she says. “You’ve got to order the flowers. I didn’t realize how much you have to do just to know what to order in advance. I’m still getting the hang of it.”
She does much of her planning when her children are sleeping. From 7 pm to midnight some nights, she’s on her computer, ordering.
Local Ontario Flower farmers have been reaching out to her, and she buys from them as well.
She keeps everything in fridges or sometimes in the basement in a cool dark area. She has to keep track of which flowers go to which event. And she has to keep her little boys away from them (“because they like to touch everything”). And then, of course, she has to create the arrangements. In addition to weddings and funerals, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day are “absolutely insane”.
But she has great family support.
“I couldn’t do it without my husband and my mom,” she says. “If my mom’s not working at The Cove, she’s here. And when my husband is free, he’s watching the children. It’s all hands on deck.” Emily’s sister and two friends also helped at Jacob and Sabrina’s wedding. “I needed all the help I could get!” she adds.
She hopes to create an actual store “so my house isn’t completely taken over”, she explains. At the moment the back area of her home is renovated for a storefront, but things got so busy so fast it likely won’t be open until spring.
Emily is grateful for the enthusiasm and encouragement she has received from the community.
“Small businesses have all been so supportive,” she says. “They give out my cards; they recommend me. It’s just great.”
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