At this year’s Art in Bloom, hosted by The Gallery at Flat Rock, flowers and art met in more ways than one. Inside the gallery, floral designers created arrangements inspired by works of art, while Liz Queen created a floral experience of her own.

Her stand at the back of the gallery overflowed with flowers, fronds and other sculptural, textural plants. Visitors selected stems and made one-of-a-kind creations, guided less by rules than by whatever captured their imagination. In the process, they became artists themselves.

Outside the gallery, Libby - Queen’s vintage Volkswagen flower truck - greeted visitors from her spot near the entrance. Together, the truck, a growing patchwork of gardens, and Liz Queen’s lifelong love of flowers reflect the beauty and joy she is bringing to the Flat Rock community through her business, Let It Be Flowers.

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*Liz Queen with Libby the Let IT Be Flower Truck*

The creative, hands-on experience is a natural fit for Liz. Along with her husband, David, she created the Hendo Bee Line sidewalk mural on Maple Street in Hendersonville. They followed it with Let’s Go Hendo!, a colorful public-art and sidewalk-mural initiative designed to enliven downtown walkways and strengthen pedestrian connections. The project also inspired a book of the same name, illustrated by Liz.

Her inspiration often comes from nature rather than conventional rules about color and texture. Years ago, while scuba diving, she noticed how the underwater world paired colors and forms in combinations people might never intentionally choose—and yet they worked beautifully. “When you see how they’re put together underwater, it inspires you to do something a little different,” she says.

That willingness to follow nature’s lead is at the heart of Let It Be Flowers, the family-owned flower truck, micro-grower and floral business Liz launched in spring 2025. Based in Flat Rock, the business offers locally crafted bouquets, subscriptions, custom floral designs, flowers for private events and pop-up flower bars where customers can select their own stems.

Its guiding purpose, expressed on the Let It Be Flowers website, is to connect people with themselves, one another and the earth through the joy of flowers.

For Liz, that purpose is both new and deeply rooted.

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Liz grew up in Greenville but has been visiting western North Carolina all her life. She attended Rockbrook Camp for Girls, and her mother attended Camp Ton-A-Wandah in an earlier era. “Mom told me about walking along Little River Road when it was just dirt to see performances at Flat Rock Playhouse,” Liz recalls with a laugh.

And flowers were part of Liz’s life long before they became her business. Her grandmother - also named Elizabeth - arranged flowers for her church, and Liz remembers learning at the hem of her skirt. Let It Be (LIB) honors her grandmother, whose nickname was Lib.

Liz’s own path to flowers, however, took a long and decidedly different route. She practiced law for four decades, beginning in 1986, handling both litigation and transactional work before becoming a risk manager for a global technology company. After spending much of her life elsewhere, Liz and her Scottish husband returned to the mountains and made their home in Flat Rock in 2014.

Now, instead of managing risk and responding to emergencies, she spends her days in gardens and among buckets of flowers. “I’ve gone from cyber technology and incident response to the beauty of the natural world,” she says, “creating and painting with flowers, and trying to bring joy to people’s lives every day.”

The seed for the business was planted before Liz retired. When a friend’s daughter was planning a wedding on a limited budget, she asked whether Liz could grow 150 zinnias. Liz tilled part of her lawn and planted them. A few months later, the bride came to collect her flowers - and left with 1,500. “We just trashed her reception with flowers,” Liz says, laughing at her choice of words. “It was beautiful.”

More important than the abundance of zinnias was the happiness they created. The experience helped shape a business model that makes locally grown flowers available to people who may not be able to afford the work of a traditional florist.

Liz also wanted a business that could serve the community. Let It Be Flowers works with nonprofits on fundraisers and donor recognition, creates flowers for restaurants and special events, and delivers bouquets to people in assisted-living communities or rehabilitation settings. Some families who live out of town arrange weekly or biweekly flower subscriptions for a loved one.

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One of Liz’s restaurant clients is Campfire Grill in Flat Rock. Owner Amelia Lindsey says Let It Be Flowers has brought an extra measure of beauty to the dining room, where fresh arrangements accompany the restaurant’s locally inspired food. “She builds incredible buckets for me with really precious things from her yard,” Lindsey says. “It has been a pure joy to arrange her flowers for the restaurant.”

Liz and Libby the flower truck will be visiting Campfire Grill on Wednesdays in September - an arrangement that began almost by chance. After a slow day at the Saluda Tailgate Market, Liz called Lindsey to ask whether the restaurant needed flowers. She arrived without plans for a formal pop-up and began pulling flowers from her van. “Several tables got up to see what she had,” Amelia recalls. “By the time she was finished, there were seven or eight arrangements floating around the restaurant. People were just instantly drawn to them.”

For Amelia, locally grown flowers belong naturally alongside locally inspired food. “I feel like it just reinforces freshness and being in touch with the world around us,” she says.

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The most visible symbol of Let It Be Flowers is Libby, a 1993 Volkswagen Kombi transformed into a mobile flower shop. The idea came during a yoga class at Wild Lotus Yoga Collective. As Liz considered what she might do after retirement, an instructor who knew she often brought flowers to class told her, in a musical Johnson City accent, “Why, you need a flower truck.”

Liz had never heard of one. The instructor showed her photographs of vintage Volkswagen flower trucks in Johnson City and Nashville, and Liz—who already had an old Beetle in her garage—immediately began searching. She found her future “business partner” in Hilton Head.

Libby is more than transportation or a colorful display. Her familiar curves invite conversation. Some visitors want to choose flowers; others want to look under the hood. Many simply want a photograph with the truck, whether they buy anything or not. “The Volkswagen is iconic,” Liz says. “There’s something for everybody.”

Libby has appeared at markets and community celebrations, including Treska’s Tuesday Market, the Saluda Tailgate Market and the opening of the Ecusta Trail. At pop-ups, customers can choose a ready-made bouquet or “paint with flowers” by selecting individual stems. For private events, the truck can become a flower bar, display and photo backdrop.

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Behind the beauty of flowers, however, is demanding work. Liz points out that flower farming means rising early, hauling and cleaning buckets, and contending with heat, insects, groundhogs, weather and the unpredictability of living things. It is not, she says, a high-margin business. “If someone gets into the flower-farming business, it’s because they love nature,” she says.

Liz and her husband have tilled much of the lawn around their Flat Rock home. About half an acre is now devoted to flowers, creating habitat for hummingbirds, lightning bugs and other wildlife. When Liz began to outgrow the space, one of her beekeeping mentors offered her a 60-by-60-foot plot on his family’s property off Old Kanuga Road. His bees needed food; she needed room for flowers. He plowed the ground with his tractor, and together they created another field of blooms. “When he told me, I cried,” Liz says. “He wanted his bees to have food, and he knew we needed a place to plant flowers, so we do it together.”

Across the two spaces, Liz grows well over 100 varieties of flowers and plants during the year. That includes multiple varieties of sunflowers, peonies and dahlias, as well as 1,600 tulips scheduled to be planted at the end of September. She uses succession planting, following spring tulips with summer sunflowers, and incorporates native plants such as mountain mint and ninebark whenever possible.

The flowers are local, seasonal and sometimes unexpected. Liz is not afraid to use plants others might dismiss as weeds if they bring the right shape, texture or beauty to an arrangement. Her style tends toward the natural and organic.

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*Liz at Art in Bloom with another happy customer*

Let It Be Flowers is growing much as Liz hoped it would: slowly, organically and mindfully. Now in its second year, the business is focusing on select artisan markets, private gatherings such as brunches, showers and small weddings, custom floral design and flower subscriptions.

Liz also creates small arrangements in reusable, upcycled containers. Some customers buy flowers to pamper someone else; others take home something beautiful for themselves. When she named those arrangements “I Love Me” flowers, they began flying off the shelves.

Either choice makes sense to Liz because flowers can carry a message that is difficult to express any other way. “Flowers enable people to express certain things without words,” she says. “Flowers transcend words.”

Selling flowers from a vintage Volkswagen is a long way from the computer screens and crisis calls of her earlier career, but Liz Queen has found purpose in this new chapter - one bouquet, one gathering and one human connection at a time.

“I love it,” she says. “I love the people. I love everything about it.”

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Learn more about Let It Be Flowers Here

The Flower Truck Delivering Joy

Protecting the Places We Love