A sunny day in July and Becky Davies’ garden is abundant with roses, verbena, colourful snapdragons of every shade, pollinators aplenty and the air thick with a floral fragrance that encapsulates summer, an aroma a perfumer would struggle to recreate.
With husband, Sean, and his mother, Julie, Becky farms beef and sheep on this hill farm on the outskirts of the Bannau Brycheiniog/Brecon Beacons National Park, land where she also grows cottage-garden blooms to supply a burgeoning market for local, seasonal cut flowers.
Regenerative principles
It is her third season as a grower, planting and cropping in harmony with the seasons and without chemicals, adopting the regenerative principles that the Davieses practice in their wider farming system.
Becky’s route to establishing River Meadow Flower Farm at Yscirfechan, Merthyr Cynog, was circuitous.
Born and brought up in Leicestershire, this ‘East Midlands girl’ studied English literature at the University of Manchester and her ambition was to work in the media.
During those student years, her parents upped and moved to the Brecon Beacons and it was when Becky spent her first Christmas at the family’s new home that she had a complete change of heart on her future career path.
Change of career path
“I totally hijacked mum and dad’s adventure because I looked around me and thought ‘No, I don’t think journalism is for me at all any more, I am going to stay here!’,’’ she recalls.
“I decided to come back to Brecon after graduating and build a life for myself here, which I did.’’
Her first job at the National Trust’s Dyffryn Gardens near Cardiff, where she fell in love with the garden, led to study at a part-time Royal Horticultural Society course at the National Botanic Garden of Wales in Carmarthenshire.
Then she met Sean, in a crowded beer tent at Brecon Show, and marriage and two children - Olivia, now seven, and six-year-old Noah - followed.
Becky put her horticultural aspirations on the back burner but moving to the farmhouse at Yscirfechan, with a ‘blank canvas’ to develop a family garden, allowed an opportunity to experiment and hone her skills.
“I had learned all the theory at college and thought ‘Come on, let’s put this into practice’ so I started taking cuttings and raising plants from seed.
“I got a good feel for what would grow here and what I enjoyed growing, what I was good at growing.’’
Setting up the business
In 2022, with Olivia and Noah both at school, Becky knew what she wanted to do professionally and that was to have a cut flower business.
She secured a Welsh Government horticulture capital investment grant of £3,000 to pay for a polytunnel, a structure that would make it easier to grow in a region where a frost in mid-May or mid-September is not uncommon.
Launching the business was daunting, despite Becky’s character as an ‘all or nothing person’.
“If I do something I will do it to the nth degree, throw my heart, soul, energy, every waking hour, into it.’’
That played in her favour as a horticulture start-up requires an inexhaustible supply of physical energy as well as time spent setting up a website, being active on social media and everything else that goes into running a business.
Becky initially used farmers’ markets as an outlet for sales but this was time consuming and, as they were mostly on a Saturday, unsustainable given her busy family life.
She then focussed on direct sales, building up a very strong client base of loyal customers.
Successes and failures
The last two years have been ‘one long learning curve’ of successes but failures too, often resulting from unpredictable and sustained weather patterns.
In spring 2025 there was drought to contend with and with it a proliferation of aphids feasting on her lupins, a very wet and cold spring in 2024, and then the challenges of the ‘slugmageddon’ summer.
These shaped Becky’s focus towards growing only plants that can flourish in most conditions.
She was brutal in the list that she drew up, striking off plants that hadn’t germinated or grown on really well, and those that didn’t produce an abundance of flowers.
“When you are growing on a medium to big scale you haven’t got the time to be fussing with plants that just don’t want to grow, you have to really narrow down what it is you are offering and make sure that a flower is really singing for its supper and not too much of a diva.’’
Becky’s philosophy is ‘right plant, right place’. It’s a phrase not too dissimilar to the one coined by Sean’s uncle, former NFU Cymru President John ‘Pentre’ Davies as part of the union’s ‘Growing Together’ tree planting strategy back in 2001.
The site at Yscirfechan is windy and prone to summer storms so sunflowers, lovely as they are and popular with brides, are out, in fact so is anything with a single flower spike.
Flowers grown
She grows cottage garden classics, hardy perennials and annuals such as sweet William, ranunculi, dahlias, roses and, since last autumn, peonies - 2,300 and with another 300 bulbs to plant this autumn.
These will take around three years to mature to a stage where they can be cut. When they do Becky will market them through retail sales, mail order and event florists.
The peony is a favourite for her as is sweet William, which she describes as a ‘doer’. “Those are the flowers I love to grow, flowers that don’t need too much attention.’’
With half an acre of peonies, a similar acreage for the general flower farm and with plans to create a pick-your-own (PYO) area at the end of this season, the two-acre business makes it a medium to large one for an artisan flower farm.
The soils
Becky’s greatest asset is the farm soil, clay loam that retains moisture and nutrients and is very friable and workable.
“They call it black gold and they are right, although we are red sandstone so technically it is red gold!
Soil is everything, it all comes from the soil and we are very lucky with our soil here.’’
The system, both in the garden and on the farm, utilises regenerative methods, ones that seventh-generation farmer Sean’s forefathers would have practised.
The farm
They have taken inspiration from James Rebanks, embarking on a course at his farm in the Lake District.
“We are convinced that going back to the way Sean’s grandfather and generations before him used to farm is the way forward for farming, certainly for our hill farm, to be sustainable, financially as well as environmentally as far as we possibly can,’’ says Becky.
That ethos extends to the hardy breeds of cattle and sheep with a suckler herd and a flock of breeding ewes which happily spend the winters outdoors.
The Davieses are transitioning away from a Hereford x Friesian to an Aberdeen Angus, those genetics introduced following the purchase of a pedigree Aberdeen Angus bull and seven heifers in 2023 from the Harewood herd at Hay-on-Wye.
They have around 600 Beulah Speckled Face ewes and have recently introduced Romney tups.
Although the farm is not registered as organic, with no concentrates or synthetic fertiliser used it is as near to that as it is possible to be.
Going forward, Becky wants to convert a small stone barn in the farmyard into a space where she can run workshops in conjunction with the small-scale PYO business, an idea that formed from ‘popular demand’ following numerous requests.
She will scale down the wedding floristry side of the business, still offering bouquets, posies and buttonholes but selling cut stems in buckets for customers to decorate marriage venues and marquees, themed according to colour scheme requests.
“I always wanted to be a grower, the floristry side of the business came about almost as an unintended consequence of being a grower, adding value to the product and selling it on, but I want to go back to my roots, to just grow and to also run workshops as I enjoy being with people.
“Crucially it will mean that I won’t need to leave the farm, that people will come to me, and that will save an awful lot of my time that I currently spend running around the countryside.’’
Bringing joy through flowers is addictive and, although Becky puts a lot of pressure on herself with a responsibility to deliver, to exceed expectations, there is a sense that she wouldn’t have it any other way.