This business started as the dream of a little girl who used to spend her summers tucked into a pink hand painted wagon with her sister being pulled down a dead-end country road by their mom, picking wildflowers to make bouquets for the kitchen table. That little girl always wished she could spend her whole life playing with flowers, making rooms look pretty and people feel happy and loved from the little bouquets she made.
Then that little girl grew into a young woman, who had big cities and fancy business meetings in mind. A life of flowers was long forgotten. She decided she wanted to be an urban planner, got her degree, and moved out west to follow her dreams. But when she got there, nothing felt very dreamy. The 9-5 days in an office made her feel tired and sad, even though she was doing what she set out to do, and so she started to wonder if maybe she had gone down the wrong road. It was time to take a new one and find out.
She sold all her things so that she could move to Australia and buy a campervan, in hopes of finding herself and rediscovering her dreams. While she discovered many things driving along those beautiful coastal Queensland roads, she still couldn’t figure out what she really wanted. She ended up in Melbourne where she got a job at funky little bar on Chapel Street, bussing tables and making friends, where she finally decided to stop searching and start enjoying life in the moment. Almost the very next day, her boss asked her to scoot down the street to the local flower shop to pick out some flowers for the bar arrangements, because the person who used to put together the vases had moved away. It was truly a moment of clarity for the young woman - the clouds of time parted and she remembered that she used to dream of a life filled with flowers.
So she went to work each week brimming with excitement about this little vases she got to design, and spent more and more time talking to the florist at the shop down the street from the bar. She talked so much about wanting to learn more about flowers, that her friends finally told her she should go to school to study their design! SO SHE DID. And then, with a year of floral design studies under her belt, and a mission to find a new place to call home somewhere in the world, she booked a trip to Southeast Asia to reward herself for her hard work and determination to follow her dreams. It was there, on a little island in Thailand, that she got dengue fever and all her plans to seek her spot in the world turned on a dime and she found herself, without a plan or a penny, back on that dead-end country road filled with wildflowers, where it all began.
Can you guess what the name of that road might be?
She decided to take it as a sign, and try her hand at pursuing her childhood dream, not an hour and a half from the road she used to do her dreaming on. She moved to Fredericton, got a job as a waitress, and poured her heart and soul into her 6 foot folding table flower display at the market every weekend. She saved all of her tips so that she could buy more buckets, to hold more flowers each week, because more and more people started to buy them! She even started travelling back to her hometown (the home of Hanson Road) once a week in a borrowed car bursting with blooms to set up a pop-up shop at the local gift store! But, every story has a sad part, and not 3 months into her new business at the market and her hometown pop-up, covid hit, and she thought all her hard work was lost and that her chance for her dream had gone down the drain.
She should never have doubted the people of Fredericton, or the efforts of truly hard work. It turns out that a global pandemic had nothing on the spirits of Frederictonians, and they came out (online, of course) in droves to support her with more flower orders and potted plant requests than she could ever have imagined! She worked day and night making bouquets and sharing her journey on social media with anyone who was interested in something positive happening during such a hard time.She started offering free flower deliveries and called it ‘Flowers On The Fly’, and soon she was contactlessly delivering over 100 bouquets per week everywhere from Fredericton and Harvey, to St. Stephen and St. Andrews in Charlotte County! Before long, she couldn’t even fit her flower shipment in her little apartment’s spare bedroom.
And so, in the middle of a global pandemic, with no actual professional florist experience under her belt, and only her tips from her waitressing job and market flowers to her name, she opened her brick and mortar shop on Brunswick Street, and that is where you can find her now, along with the most incredible team - living out what actually turns out to be beyond her wildest dreams.
Now, Hanson Road is a small batch floral design studio and plant shop, filled with locally designed artisanal bath, body and lifestyle products, offering limited quantities of seasonal hand-tied bouquets inspired by a unique color palette every week year round. We offer a jungle of stunning houseplants to satisfy every leafy green desire, as well as a curated collection of New Brunswick made and loved products. We are a one stop shop for a luxurious self care experience that everyone deserves to have, and we plan to only grow up from here.