Gem City Style: May 2026
An interview with Kelly Dundulė of Bella's Blooms Flower Company
It was a warm spring afternoon when I pulled up to the farmhouse in Millcreek where Kelly Dundulė grows her flowers and operates her flower studio. The tulips were almost finished for the season – their last days, she'd tell me later – and the ground was being turned over in preparation for something new. Kelly showed me around then we sat on the front porch, easy and unhurried, the kind of person who seems entirely at home in the place they've made for themselves. There was a breeze and the air had that particular warmth Erie makes you wait all winter for.
Bella's Blooms Flower Company is a locally owned flower farm and studio tucked into Millcreek where Kelly grew up. She left Erie at 18, convinced, unfortunately like a lot of us, that there wasn't much here for her. She spent years away, built a career as a CPA, and moved around the country. Then she came back. "When I lived in LA, you couldn't get anywhere in 10 minutes," she said, laughing. Her commute now is less than that.
The farm started the way a lot of unexpected things do – slowly, almost accidentally, during COVID. Kelly and her husband Matt lived on land that had never been actively farmed. She'd grown vegetables successfully. She'd thrown out some sunflowers and cosmos, and they took off. So she got curious. "I got on YouTube trying to figure out how to grow ranunculus," she told me. What she found were flower farmer videos – people sharing their process, their fields, their lives – and something clicked. "I had never met a flower farmer. It had never dawned on me that was actually a business you could start."
By January 2022, Bella's Blooms was becoming real. The name belongs to her late cat – a gray tabby who followed Kelly across the country and back.
I asked Kelly what she wants people to understand about locally grown flowers, the thing she wishes more Erie residents knew before reaching for the grocery store bunch. Her answer was direct. "They're a totally different product," she said. "They serve the same need, but locally grown flowers are seasonal. What's available in April is different from August and different from October." Grocery store flowers, she explained, are bred specifically for the global supply chain – engineered to survive weeks of transportation and storage, which means the traits we actually love about flowers, the scent, the variation, the organic softness, get bred out. And then there's the sourcing. Many flowers in the mass market come from countries where wages are low, working conditions can be unsafe, and pesticides are used without adequate protection. Every stem has to be fumigated before crossing the border. "All of that processing before it ever gets to you," she said.
The alternative she's building is hyperlocal, seasonal, and alive in a way that commercial flowers simply aren't.
When I visited, Kelly was deep in the rhythm of early spring – one of the busiest stretches of the year. Mother's Day weekend is ahead, one of the farm's biggest events, when families can come out to the studio and pick up bouquets of her flowers. Warm-season planting was underway. Between 1,500 and 2,000 dahlia tubers were going in the ground. "We're always thinking of a whole year cycle down the road," she said. "Everything I learned from doing it this year, I don't get a chance to put that into practice for a whole other year."
The farm has grown steadily since that first season. A small CSA (community supported agriculture) launched early and was sold out within the first weeks of the year. This year the number of slots was expanded and they were still all taken by Valentine's Day. There are now weddings and events alongside the weekly flower drops at places like the Erie Food Co-op. And then there's the studio: a temperature-controlled, self-serve space on the property where patrons can walk in Thursday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 9 to 3, choose a selection, and go. "Flowers don't love the elements," Kelly said of why she enclosed it rather than going full roadside stand. The studio keeps everything fresh, beautiful, accessible – stocked and ready when you are.
Kelly calls herself both a flower farmer and a florist, though she admitted the second title still comes with a small edge of impostor syndrome. "Farming felt like I could say I'm a farmer," she said. "But florist – it feels like an art and a craft." She's claimed it anyway, practicing through friends' weddings, learning the design side the same way she learned the farming side: by doing it, season after season. This year she's trying calla lilies for the first time, following the trend back into wedding florals.
Erie's climate, she told me, is actually well-suited to certain flowers that struggle in warmer regions. Tulips need cold. So do peonies. "There's certain things that do well because our climate is what it is," she said. Roses, on the other hand, she's made peace with. "For the effort, I'm never going to grow roses of the same quality they grow in Ecuador." It's the kind of honest reckoning that good farmers make – knowing what the land gives you and working with it.
I asked her what farming has taught her about herself that she didn't expect. She paused, then laughed a little. "I really like control," she said. Accountants tend to, she acknowledged – there's a comfort in problems that have a single right answer. Farming offers no such thing. "Your business partner is mother nature." The flexibility it's forced on her, the willingness to let things be good enough, to trust that the crop is going to come – that's been the education. "Just letting that stuff go," she said, "and being able to embrace what's here."
The farm is a family operation. Matt manages the farm full-time and Kelly's parents pitch in too. The whole thing runs alongside her day job as director of finance and accounting at Accudyn Products, Inc.. She is, by any measure, doing a lot. But standing on that porch, watching the fields turn toward summer, it didn't feel like too much. It felt like exactly the right amount.
If you ask Kelly what flower she'd be, she answers without hesitation: a dahlia. "Dahlias have a ton of personality," she said. "So much variety – shapes, sizes, colors. They're really unique." She lit up sharing the fact that every seed saved from a dahlia flower head will grow into something completely different. Entirely new colors, entirely new forms. Dahlia season at Bella's Blooms runs from early August through late October. I'm already planning my visit.
To learn more about Bella's Blooms, visit bellasblooms.com
Gem City Style is a monthly column featuring an intimate profile of someone making a creative impact in Erie. If you or someone you know would make a good fit for a future Gem City Style, email jessica@eriereader.com
