Cultivating Connection Through Growing & Giving Flowers: Interview with Deanna Kitchen
Today, I’m thrilled to share with you an interview with the founder of The Growing Kindness Project, Deanna Kitchen. I came across Deanna and her amazing work when I first got into giving away flowers and am now a proud “Growing Kindness Cultivator.” Let’s dive in!
Photo by Rylea Foehl
1. I'm so impressed with the organization you've started! Can you describe a little bit about what Growing Kindness is for those who don't know yet?
More than ever, the world can feel like a disconnected and lonely place. We all long for meaningful connection and opportunity to build relationships and give back in our communities-but knowing how and where to start can feel overwhelming. The Growing Kindness Project helps bridge the gap, giving people a tangible, accessible tool to foster real, meaningful connections, build community and spread kindness. We bring people together. And we do it with flowers.
Flowers are perhaps one of the most powerful ways to communicate when there are no words. Nayyirah Waheed once asked, “Can we speak in flowers? It will be easier for me to understand.” There is nothing like flowers to let another person know they are seen, cared for and deserve kindness. That’s why we use flowers as a catalyst: they become the tool that carries more words than we can express and enables us to nurture a connection where there was none before.
People have a real, visceral response when you walk in the door holding flowers. When they learn the flowers are for them, freely given in kindness…well, there truly are no words for the joy that’s exchanged. In that moment, even if it’s just for a moment, there is an opportunity for real, meaningful conversation and connection. Even the most hardened, withdrawn individuals respond to flowers and kindness.
But growing flowers, especially for beginner gardeners, can feel a little daunting. That’s where we help. The GK Project comes alongside our team members, wherever they are in the gardening journey and provides coaching, education and support to help them transform from having never planted a flower seed or struggling to grow flowers to successfully harvesting armloads of blooms. When we pour into our team members and support them with not just growing resources, but the camaraderie of having a team cheering them on and sharing a beautiful mission, then they have an abundance of blooms, kindness, and inspiration to pour out into their community.
Photo by Rylea Foehl
2. What inspired you to create Growing Kindness?
It’s been an incredible process watching the Growing Kindness Project grow and develop because it started with just one tiny intention: to fill my own need for connection and belonging in my community.
Twelve years ago, I had just resigned my teaching position. I was staying home with our two little boys and as much as I loved being a fully present mama, I also felt really lonely. I missed feeling connected and knowing where I fit in my community. Growing up, I was born and raised in tiny, rural town and I thought it was perfectly normal to exchange hello’s with everyone you met at the post office, gas station or grocery store. It wasn’t until I moved away as a young adult I realized how unusual an experience that was and how much I dearly missed it.
That year, in an effort to fill up some space in our newly fenced yard, I planted a whole row of sweet peas along one portion of the fence. They bloomed abundantly and with them grew the answer to my need. I filled up a box with baby food jars and tucked in as sweet peas as I could fit. With a bouncing baby on one hip and a toddler holding tightly to my purse strings, I got up the courage to walk into our local long-term care facility.
If it hadn’t been for the flowers, I don’t know if I would have been brave enough to just walk in the door and ask for the opportunity to visit and encourage others. But the flowers gave me the tool I needed - they gave me the courage to reach out. Later that afternoon, I walked out the door with an empty box, a very full heart, and a strong feeling that something really special was beginning.
As long as the sweet peas bloomed, we kept sharing flowers. And then, each summer after that, we kept going. As my garden and our little boys grew, our opportunity to share increased. I went from carrying wee little babes with a single box filled with jars to having three capable little boys beside me who would help me tow our Radio Flyer wagon filled with buckets of bouquets sharing with dozens of residents each visit.
On one such visit an older gentleman pulled me down beside him and said, “You know, I just wish that more people like us (residents in care facilities) could get to experience this.” We were just one little family: we could only reach so far. And yet, his wish planted the seed of an idea in my heart: why couldn’t there be connections like this happening in more communities? If flowers were the catalyst that was making it all happen-how could we help more people grow flowers?
That spring, standing in my barn dividing dahlia tubers, I realized I was holding the answer. Our little family and our little wagon couldn’t reach any farther, but we could invite others in our community to join us.
And so the Growing Kindness Project was born.
At first, we gave away free dahlia tubers to anyone who would join us in growing and giving flowers in our local communities. Over a hundred people joined us in 2018. But we quickly learned that just sharing tubers wasn’t enough: what people needed more than tubers was help to know how to plant and tend cut flowers and a sense of team and support around this mission. So, the project has evolved over the last four years, providing team, education and resources to help individuals successfully grow and share flowers, whether they’re master gardeners or have never planted a seed. We’re now a 501c3 organization supporting a global team with an online community forum and master classes on gardening and floral design. More than that, we’ve become the “keeper of the stories” sharing and amplifying the incredible stories of kindness in communities across the world as our team members foster real, impactful connections and goodwill by sharing flowers.
3. What’s your best tip for new flower gardeners?
Growing flowers is one of the most rewarding experiences. Flowers really are simple to grow and there are so, so many varieties available. Because of this, it's tremendously easy to over-purchase and over-plant and end up with a garden that’s far bigger and more demanding than you intended or can keep up with.
My best advice is to start small. When you begin with “cut and come again” varieties like cosmos, zinnias and calendula you’ll be able to harvest bloom after bloom from the same plants all summer long. This means that you need far less plants than you think you do to be able to grow A LOT of flowers!
Photo (left) by Rylea Foehl
The other reason I encourage new gardeners to start small is because flowers are labor intensive, rather than land intensive. It’s really easy to under-estimate both the number of blooms your garden will produce and the amount of labor it takes to keep up with even a small flower garden. When those two happen, you’ll end up with too many flowers and not enough time to manage them and-oddly as it sounds- it can be more discouraging than having a maintainable garden that has you wishing for more blooms.
If you’ve never grown flowers before, or even if you’re scaling up the size of your garden, I highly recommend sticking to planting more, but less: stick with a handful of high-yield, go-to performers rather than trying dozens and dozens of different varieties. Try a few new things each growing season, but don’t get caught up in all the seed catalogs and then drown in the overwhelm (and expense) of having too many seeds and too many flowers. (I know, I know: it seems strange to think that too many flowers would be a problem, but trust me: watching them go to waste because you don’t have time to tend, harvest, arrange and share them is actually more discouraging than wishing for more blooms!)
Photo by Rylea Foehl
4. Do you have a favorite story from an ambassador that’s stuck out to you?
Oh goodness, there have been so, so many members of our team who have touched my heart with their kindness, care and generosity. One of the greatest privileges and responsibilities of the GK Project is to be the keeper of their stories: tenderly and carefully holding them and sharing them with the world so they ripple out and impact the world with kindness. Our “Keepers of Kindness” series is one way that we bring these beautiful, impactful stories to the world. These stories, like single beautiful threads, weave together a beautiful tapestry of kindness.
I would love to share Ganjana’s story with you because it exemplifies the way that kindnes kindness truly has a way of healing.
When Ganjana was a young teenager, she immigrated to the US from Thailand with her twin sister so they could be near their mother who was receiving treatment for cancer. When their mother suddenly passed away, Ganjana and her sister were essentially on their own to care for each other as orphans and immigrants. After a childhood of trauma and the loss of her mother, then suddenly being catapulted into adulthood in a foreign country, Ganjana began struggling with what would later become debilitating anxiety.
Years and years later, Ganjana was volunteering at her local food bank, where she was also a client. It was the Holiday distribution when, along with the standard weekly provisions, recipients are also given all the trimmings for a holiday meal. As Ganjana was volunteering, she noticed people walking by with beautiful holiday centerpieces. When she finished her volunteer shift and took her turn to collect her own groceries, she was handed an evergreen holiday centerpiece. She was moved to tears. She later shared with me that she stood there in disbelief and asked, “Who does this? Who gives flowers like this? I have to meet this person. I have to be involved with this.”
Because the centerpieces included the Growing Kindness bouquet tag, she was able to look up the project and signed up to be a member right away. Ganjana planted her first flower garden that spring. The GK project was beside her, step by step, to help her learn to grow, harvest and design flowers. With flowers in hand, Ganjana began slowly, bravely reaching out in her community. Stem by stem, growing and giving flowers brought healing and gave her a tool and mission that helped her connect in her community.
The next year, Ganjana later applied and was accepted as a 2021 Ambassador. Being a part of the team brought her into even more community, connection and support. Ganjana made friends with members across the world including Sally, from England, who is now her best friend.
Ganjana is currently an Ambassador Alumni and continues to grow and share flowers in her community and build connections and friendships through the GK team. Her example and her story will always be one of my favorites because it shows us that we truly have no idea how one single bouquet, gifted in kindness can impact others.
Photo by @slcook52
5. Why have you focused on growing dahlias specifically?
This is such a great question! Dahlias in so many ways are representative of kindness.
Kindness, like dahlias, comes in limitless shapes and forms. Kindness grows in exponential ways. Dahlias are a “cut and come again” flower: each time you cut a stem, the plant will be encouraged to produce more stems. And while dahlia plants are producing beautiful flowers above the ground, below they’re investing energy in multiplying and growing tubers. That means that in one season a single tuber can multiply 4-8 times.
One single act of kindness has been shown to impact as many as 100 people. And those people, hearts touched by experiencing or witnessing kindness, are uplifted and encouraged and may in turn carry out their own acts of kindness.
While we encourage our team to grow ANY flower that’s easy to grow and does well in their climate, we do provide a lot of resources and education about dahlias because dahlias have provided us with incredible opportunity to not only give more flowers, but help even more people start their own Growing Kindness garden. Each year, we provide our Ambassador team with a starter kit with dahlia tubers. They grow, then divide those tubers and give them other GK team members or their community members to help them begin even more Growing Kindness gardens. With our team of 100 ambassadors growing dahlias each year, dahlias give us an incredible opportunity to invite so many more people into growing and giving flowers in kindness!
Photo by Rylea Foehl
6. Where are your favorite places to give bouquets?
Oh, I love this question!
Over the past years, as a family, we’ve shared flowers in retirement homes, longterm care facilities, food banks, with clerks, librarians, first responders, clerks, receptionists strangers at the grocery store and gas station.
One of our favorite ways to give is to “Give Two.” Wherever we’re going that day, we take two bouquets. One is gifted to the clerk, receptionist, doctor, etc for them to keep and the other is given to them with the request to share it with someone they meet who could use some encouragement. The response has always been overwhelmingly positive: not only does the recipient get to enjoy the beauty of flowers but they also get to enter into the joy and goodwill of giving flowers to another.
But, for me, one of the most inspiring things has been seeing the ways our GK team members share flowers in their communities across the world. Each one uses their unique heart, experiences and vision to identify the needs in their community. Because of that, flowers are being shared in such diverse and inspiring ways all across the world.
It would be impossible to list them all here, but a of my few favorite ways that I’ve witnessed our team members give include: Ronald McDonald House, school for the deaf, hospice, children’s hospitals, food banks and food pantries, hospital staff, teachers, mental health care providers, shelters for victims of domestic violence, fertility clinics, respite programs, foster families, oncology centers, free flower stands for neighbors, librarians, refugee students and their families, lonely neighbors, long term care homes and retirement facilities, preschool students (who then shared in their community), transitional housing facilities, and youth centers are just a few examples.
However or wherever a person chooses to give, the goal is to just begin. Whether it’s a single stem held out in kindness to a neighbor walking by your yard or loads of blooms to long term care residents, reaching out with what you have and where you are truly is enough to change someone’s life. Desmund Tutu once said, “Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” It’s an awe inspiring thing picturing each one of our team members across the world, each repeating this simple, yet profound act of giving flowers in kindness, each time creating a ripple effect of kindness that continues to extend and impact lives far beyond what we can imagine.
7. How can readers get involved with Growing Kindness?
If growing flowers and impacting your community with kindness is something that resonates with you, we would love to have you come and join our team! You don’t need any gardening experience or even a lot of growing space: if you’ve got a little bit of dirt and a big heart, you have what it takes to start Growing Kindness in your community! We’ll help you with all the rest.
Photo by @rosie.simplyrosie
There are lots of ways you can get connected and be a part of this mission! If you’re looking for connection with like-minded individuals AND coaching and education to help you grow more flowers, I’d highly recommend joining us as a GK Cultivator. This is our membership role and provides you with access to our community forum, coaching, and resource library that includes classes on everything from seed starting to weed management to floral design.
Each year, we also select 100 ambassadors to help lead and represent our project. Our Ambassador applications will open to our current members in the new year. We are so, so excited about the new ways we’re working to bring even more education, resources and connection to help you successfully grow and give flowers in your community, so be sure to follow along by joining our newsletter. You can also follow us on Instagram @growingkindnessproject where you can see more of how our team members are giving flowers in their communities and learn tips and tricks for growing and designing cut flowers.
I want to give a big thank you to Deanna for this interview. I hope you’ll check out the Growing Kindness Project!
