About the farm.
Foxhound Flower Farm is a family farm in Buies Creek, North Carolina previously growing tobacco and now growing cut flowers on about 2 acres of land. The flower farm is run by Ashley with the help of her dad and grandfather. We focus on specialty flowers like ranunculus, anemone, lisianthus and dahlias. We also grow many other unique annuals and perennials. We're proud to make a living by farming small and sustainably and providing some truly exceptional beauty to our local communities.
Scroll down to read about the legendary man behind our name.
Cack Johnson
Our farm and Foxhound Flowers is because of and in the name of my great-grandfather, Caswell Johnson, known by his friends as Cack and by his family as Papa. He was a man with more energy for life than anyone I have ever met. Like most others from his time in our part of the country, Papa was a tobacco farmer. He spent majority of his days on this earth in the hot tobacco fields that surround Foxhound Flower Farm, but this was long before our farm grew flowers. Our family farm has been many things. My great-grandfather started in tobacco, my grandfather raised hogs and my father and his brother did the same until a future in small-scale farming became more difficult to achieve and so they went off to college. There was always a vegetable garden we ate from, chickens for laying (except for years the coyotes ate them all) and horses for riding. From time to time there have been cows, goats (my Sugar and Spice pictured above), sheep, mini horses, a donkey, and at one point we added an additional four ponds with the vague idea of farming fish. My personal favorite on our farm were Papa’s foxhounds.
Papa was completely and totally obsessed with fox hunting. It is a big sport where I’m from. Men raise their hounds from puppies and train them to sniff out the scent of a fox, track it and tree it. I loved those hounds so much I could squeeze each one to death (pictured above is me trying to do just that). The point is not to kill the fox. My dad says men like Papa just like to listen to the dogs, which to anyone else might sound loud and awful like 10,000 fingernails on a chalkboard. I know this is true because when Papa was older and no longer had foxhounds, someone he used to hunt with brought over a recording of a hunt. Just a sound recording, not video, but when Papa listened to it, he would close his eyes and smile. Men who love it as Papa did see the chaos of a herd of dogs barking crazily at a fox in a tree with pride for their hounds working as one perfect unit to do a job.
All this is to say that Foxhound Flower Farm is named for a man I admire and love dearly and after something that he loved dearly. My great-grandfather took pleasure in the simplicity of life. It doesn’t mean it was always easy, but he genuinely didn’t feel a need for anything more than what he had. He was always present right where he was and found so much joy in the world around him every single day and that’s what Foxhound Flowers are all about.