Montreal’s first cut flower green care farm is not only growing beautiful blooms, it’s also blossoming bonds between people with and without intellectual disabilities.
The new project was born out of the love between a former medical ethicist and her neurodivergent big brother.
“We feel really, really good about it,” said Posy Flower Farm founder Lucy Wade, standing next to her older brother Harris. “I think for me, it’s a bit like coming home.”
Wade created Posy Flower Farm in Montreal this spring on a small plot of land at the Verdun borough’s municipal greenhouse.
Where the flowers are now growing, dahlias, cosmos and zinnias among them, not long ago, there was just grass and weeds on the “unloved” tract.
“It was a huge job. It just took a little elbow grease, eh Harris?” she said to her brother.
Harris lives with an intellectual disability. He works regular shifts at the flower farm, along with new employee, Ellis, who is also is also neurodivergent.
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She’s hoping the green care farm becomes a place where neurotypical people can not only shop for flowers, but also gain a better understanding of the realities of people living with intellectual disabilities.
“The idea is that if we can put people in the community who don’t have disabilities in contact with something beautiful, where they can also see people with disabilities doing something they value and contributing in a very real way to the functioning of this business,” Wade explained.
Green care farming is when people with medical conditions, including intellectual disabilities, get major benefits from working outdoors, surrounded by people.
When people with disabilities age out of school, society offers little support for them or their loved ones.
“They end up kind of retreating away from society and being more at home,” she said.
Wade decided to leave her career as a medical ethicist at the Jewish General Hospital to create an environment where her brother and others with disabilities could thrive. Before being an ethicist, she studied sperm whales in the Maritimes as a marine biologist.
“I do mulch. I do watering, and we sell a bunch of flowers,” Harris said.
Wade said she felt in her work life, she had to “compartmentalize” a major part of herself: being the sister of a brother with a disability. She wanted to bring both sides of her to the forefront at the flower farm.
“I think this is something that a lot of siblings of people with disabilities will understand,” she said.
“You have your family life and the life where inclusion of people with disabilities is completely natural and normal. And then you have your other life where people don’t understand that. And you pick and choose who you share that with.”
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