Blackberry Hill Flowers offering bouquets
GENTRY — Blackberry Hill Flowers, a new business venture of Gentry native Wendy Dillahunty Jackson, is offering flower bouquets at Sweeten Collective Company in Gentry.
The new floral business plans to offer subscription bouquets to customers, a service in which the customer prepays for guaranteed bouquets for a set number of weeks. On the designated day, either every week or every other week, bouquets are delivered to Sweeten Collective Co. or directly to the customer. And, bouquets are also available weekly for anyone who would like to walk in at Sweetens.
“We are currently doing paper-wrapped market bouquets and petite arrangements in a small milk bottle,” Jackson said.
Blackberry Hill Flowers has moved from a dream of Jackson’s to reality.
“For the last three or four years, this has been a dream of mine,” Jackson said. “Last year I started the process — figuring out the growing, figuring out the arranging, making some contacts, taking some classes. … This year I decided to make it a reality.”
Jackson has always had a love of flowers, and her Gentry High School students in agriculture classes, 4-H and FFA have seen that interest in flowers and floral arrangements in the greenhouse at the high school and in the flowers and floral arrangements she helps them prepare and sell.
“I got my love of growing things from my Grandma Dillahunty,” Jackson said. “She instilled a love of plants and flowers that
I have had since I was a kid. I would spend time in the summers at her house and she would take me around every day during her garden chores and quiz me on the names of the plants. Some of my students probably feel this way now,” she added. “When we visited, we rarely left without a bouquet wrapped in a wet paper towel to bring home,” she said.
Jackson said she is a Gentry native who took a 10-year detour to South Carolina. She is an agriculture teacher at Gentry High School and she says, “I love doing what I do.”
She said she grew up dairy farming and did that up until four years ago.
Jackson has three children — Ashley, Hannah and Garrison — and they are all helping her out with this new adventure.
“Ashley works in Fayetteville and helps with brainstorming and the business side,” she said. “Hannah is a student at OSU, majoring in horticulture, and is managing the social media and helping any other way she can help from long distance. Jackson calls Hannah her “plant girl.” Garrison, she said, helps out with the hard labor and whatever she asks of him until he heads off to Ouachita Baptist in July.
Next year, she hopes to incorporate a you-pick destination, Buckets of Blooms, for do-it-yourselfers and photo venue opportunities.
Jackson may be contacted by email at blackberryhillflowers@gmail.com. Her business is also on Facebook and Instagram at Blackberry Hill Flowers or www.facebook.com/ blackberryhillflowers.
Sweeten Collective Co., which offers the bouquets, as well as a variety of women’s clothing in Gentry, is located at 882 S. Gentry Blvd., next-door to Krein Development and Jim’s Razorback Pizza.