From left, Paige Southwood, Brooke Donahue, Fiona Buckley, Lily Crane, and Lauren Lenz stand in front of Rathvinen’s hoop house, where a bounty of blooms is grown
Rathvinden Flower Farm Continues to Bloom
Glowing dots speckle the soaring wood ceilings and dance along the pine tongue-and-groove walls as guests fill the atrium and stream through the entryway corridor. A musician strums his guitar and sings to the crowd as people gather in Rathvinden’s festive flower barn, filled with craft booths selling their wares for the holidays.
This celebration, held last fall, marked the opening of Rathvinden’s newly built barn, the culmination of owner Fiona Buckley’s wildest dreams.
Buckley, a first-generation American, started Rathvinden more than a decade ago with high hopes, a strong work ethic, but no farming experience. Born to Irish parents who immigrated to the U.S. for greater economic opportunities, Buckley was expected to achieve great things in the land of the free. She followed in her father’s footsteps and pursued a medical degree, and after graduation she purposefully searched for a home, ultimately choosing Bozeman, where she became a partner in an anesthesiology practice. But the windowless corridors and fluorescent lights took their toll on the free-spirited young doctor. Ski weekends and mountain biking excursions weren’t enough to satisfy Buckley’s hunger for earth and air. The fresh mountain breeze and open space of the valley beckoned.
In 2011 when she eventually bought the 50-acre property northwest of Bozeman in the Springhill area, she didn’t tell a soul. It would be months before she let the news slip to her friends that she had bought a farm.
“It didn’t seem real,” Buckley says. “There were so many moments when I didn’t think it would happen that it was almost impossible to believe when it finally did.”
Her original dream was to build an animal sanctuary founded on her love for all living things, primarily sheep dogs and frogs. But the logistics of that dream would soon run it to the ground. Perhaps it was never meant to be.
A few years passed before a flower growing at the side of her house caught her eye, and shortly thereafter, she filled her kitchen with test tubes and germination chambers. She began experimenting, as any good scientist would, right in her backyard. Soon she had rows of peonies, herbs, flowering shrubs and trees, and a wild assortment of seeds, bulbs, and tubers.
Hours in anesthesia would bring dollars that went toward new farm equipment and hoop houses. Before long, the hospital would feel farther away as more and more of her time and energy would be devoted to Rathvinden, so named for her grandparents’ farm in Ireland and meaning “fort of the faeries.”
Buckley always knew that the health and vitality of the land and the people who worked it were more important than the bottom line. Hardworking people from around the valley came to exchange farm labor for free flowers and veggies and a slice of land to park their vehicle-turned-homes. Friends would help build fences and outbuildings on weekends when they weren’t skiing or climbing the nearby peaks. It was all a labor of love.
Eventually, around 2015, Buckley started selling her flowers to florists and hosting small-scale weddings. The farm had to become profitable to remain sustainable, given the hours, days, weeks, and months she was now devoting to the land. As the farm grew, so did the bills. Money was needed to purchase seeds, compost, soil amendments, farm equipment, and more labor. She hired people to work alongside her while teaching them the regenerative farming methods she was learning herself. The farm crew waxed and waned with the seasons, with each new year bringing new flower beds and new farming experiments. The field remained Buckley’s favorite science lab.
She continued clocking hours in the anesthesiology department and put away money to build the flower barn of her dreams—a place that could bring both plants and humans together in all seasons and in all weather. Finally, in the summer of 2024, local contractor Sustainabuild broke ground and began building Buckley’s vision of a passive-solar quarter-domed barn overlooking the growing flower fields.
Buckley never intended to pursue this dream alone; however, long, backbreaking hours in the sun and low pay made help transient and good help difficult to keep. But as they say, if you build it, they will come.
Lauren Lenz arrived in the spring of 2024, just before the barn started to take shape. As half of the duo who built and ran the successful Bozeman flower farm Calliope for four years, Lenz brought valuable farming experience. Before Calliope, she worked on several other vegetable and flower farms in Gallatin Valley and in her home state of New Hampshire. Her farming skills, paired with her experience as a graphic designer and successful marketer, made her a central player on the Rathvinden team.
Lily Crane and Brooke Donahue came that same year. Both had recently moved to the valley from warmer climates and were looking for jobs to satisfy their hunger to connect with the land. Though Crane arrived with a background and degrees in social work and public relations, she was eager to learn and ready to work hard. Having grown up in the rural Northeast with a farming family, she knew the kind of labor it took to run a successful farm.
This summer, the barn will see its first couples married among the blooms and dancing under the disco ball. Private groups are invited to explore Rathvinden’s brand-new cutting garden while enjoying unobstructed views of the Bridger Mountains.
Donahue also had energy to work and knowledge of how things grow. Her environmental studies degree and prior farming experience deepened her understanding of how all living things interact and depend on one another to survive.
I was the last to join the team, arriving in the spring of 2025. In my role, I follow faces and chase light with my camera to record not just a scene, but the emotions behind the flowers and the fields that we cultivate at Rathvinden. What I see behind the eyes and underneath the obvious are individual journeys of sacrifice for sustainability, sweat for sweetness, solitude for sovereignty.
The Rathvinden renaissance is saturating the calendar with color. Flower-filled events and workshops pepper every month throughout the year. Early winter saw friends gathering to make wreaths with dried flowers. February marked the team’s first farm dinner hosted collaboratively with Mountain Provisions, as well as a floral Valentine-making class paired with chocolate from local chocolatier Caldera Cacao. Each month, Gallatin Valley community members gather in the sunlit barn to learn and create with beautiful locally and sustainably grown blooms.
This summer, the barn will see its first couples married among the blooms and dancing under the disco ball. Private groups are invited to explore Rathvinden’s brand-new cutting garden while enjoying unobstructed views of the Bridger Mountains.
In addition to classes and events, Rathvinden has expanded its bouquet subscription options to meet every flower-lover’s appetite, from a four-week spring blooms order to the full 22-week Flower Freak subscription. It’s a color-lover’s dream come true.
The crowds who came to celebrate on that first day of the Rathvinden renaissance revealed a mighty glimpse of the future. A future filled with nature, humans, light, levity, movement, color, music, thoughtfulness, energy, and love.
