BLACKFOOT, Idaho — Vanessa Kuemmerle, a flower farmer in eastern Idaho, helps supply a niche market of fresh cut flowers for destination weddings in nearby resort towns.

At Florage Farms near Blackfoot, she and her partner, Lorin Harrison, and their staff care for more than 100 varieties of flowers in fields and three greenhouses on nearly 12 acres.

FFA students from nearby schools gain work experience there, assisting a staff of nine employees and seasonal workers.

“My whole life has been devoted to plants and will be until I take my last breath,” said Kuemmerle, who has another farm in the mountains of southwestern Maine. “They have been my friends and I serve them and they serve me.”

As a horticulturalist, landscape designer, floral designer and flower farmer, Kuemmerle has been working with plants professionally for 35 years.

Florage Farms has an ideal location, being two hours from Jackson, Wyo., to the east and another two hours to Sun Valley, Idaho, to the west.

They work with wedding planners, who hire floral designers seeking unusual varieties of locally grown flowers and ornamental foliage to create visually stunning settings.

The wedding season coincides with their growing season from spring to fall.

Kuemmerle said Florage Farms is known for “providing unusual and hardy flowers that florists cannot get shipped with the freshness and quality of what we deliver from the farm.”

One of the farm’s unusual flowers is a chocolate Cosmos that smells just like chocolate.

What is her favorite flower?

“I’m a bit of a dichotomy. I gravitate to the obscure and delicate species like Anthriscus and Heuchera as well as the most bodacious blooms, like Tall Bearded Iris and Dahlias. I’m also a big fan of foliage, with its textures, shapes and colors. Foliage is the unsung hero of most flower arrangements.”

Despite a short growing season, intense sun, and a soil pH of 8.2, some flowers grow well in eastern Idaho, including Scabiosa, Delphinium, Anemone, Lisianthus, and Icelandic Poppies.

Some of the farm’s most popular flowers are varieties of Tulips, Filipendula, Ranunculus, Dahlia, Veronica, Bells of Ireland, Snapdragons, and Sweet Peas.

To keep updated about new flower varieties, Kuemmerle and Harrison travel to Italy and the Netherlands to see what flower researchers are developing.

In April during a tour in the Netherlands that was organized for growers, they saw new varieties of flowers that will be on the market in five to seven years.

New Ranunculus varieties will be a light lavender, pink blushes and white. It can take more than a decade to hybridize, trial and release new varieties.

Depending on the first frost, the farm shuts down by October or November.