Starting a Flower Farm

By: Debra Prinzing

What happens when an architect and a former Walt Disney imagineer start farming? If they’re Andrea and Lou Gagnon, they can’t help but make art – even in the fields.

When the couple returned to the family farm to raise their children and establish a new way of life on 10 acres of agricultural land, the owners of LynnVale Studios embraced a new medium – flowers – and began growing thousands of stems to supply local and seasonal bouquets to customers in the nation’s capital.

College sweethearts who each earned a bachelor of architecture degree from Virginia Tech, Andrea and Lou spent a decade working on the West Coast before returning in 2002 to an acreage that Lou’s family has farmed for eight generations in Gainesville, Virginia, about 30 miles west of Washington, D.C.