PETAL POWER
Florabundant's Anita Nettles Stefanski's blooming island business
HOME & GARDEN
story by Kristin Detterline
photography by Kit Noble
While the rest of Nantucket is still sleeping, Florabundant’s Anita Nettles Stefanski is already hard at work on the farm. Every day in the summer she begins cutting flowers around 5 a.m. and then delivers the haul of seasonal blooms to florists and private clients around the island. She starts early to avoid working in the heat, but also because it’s what the flowers seem to prefer.
"The flowers don’t like to be cut in the middle of the day or when it’s really hot,” says Stefanski. “They love to be cut first thing in the morning. That’s when they’re going to behave the best. Flowers are like people—they can be temperamental.” Florabundant Inc. is Stefanski’s landscaping company specializing in full-service install, design and maintenance for residential and commercial clients. Started in 2006 with business partner Julie Hilberg-Hunt, Stefanski has been the sole owner and designer for more than five years. Stefanski summered on Nantucket as a child but moved to the island full time when she was seven years old with her mother, who grew up in Sweden, and her father, who was born and raised in Harlem. She’s married to Michael Adam Stefanski, a fellow green thumb who owns Seed to Stone Landscaping.
Stefanski credits her free-flowing approach to design to her mother, who was an internationally known weaver and designer. “I spent a lot of time in the studio with her, watching her work and observing her movements. I feel like that has inspired how I lay out gardens. Movement and color are very important to me.”
Stefanski says that her aesthetic is always changing based on her clients’ needs as well as garden availability. She prefers to design onsite
rather than prepare elaborate plans that are often prone to change.
That organic approach to gardening, along with a long-standing family relationship, was one of the reasons that Dean Long invited Stefanski to
grow flowers at his farm, Nantucket Vineyard. This summer will be their third season working together.
As a Black woman farmer, Stefanski belongs to a dwindling community. According to the most recent statistics available in the 2017 Census of Agriculture, the United States had 48,000 producers who identified as Black, either alone or in combination with another race.
They accounted for 1.4 percent of the country’s 3.4 million producers.
Over a century ago, there were nearly one million Black farmers in
the United States. Stefanski says that she is proud to be a Black farmer and a face for the local farming community. “There’s a lot of brown girls on Nantucket who really want to do something like gardening,” she adds. “There needs to be more guidance and mentoring for children of color on the island in general because I feel like they’re still in a box where they can’t do certain things. They can do whatever they want to do when they grow up.”
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