About us

A family legacy since 1940

Florea offers high-quality garden products – with a focus on seeds, bulbs, and tubers. The company was founded in 2020 by Erik Hoekstra, son of Johannes Hoekstra and grandson of Georg Hoekstra, and stems from a long family tradition.

Georg was born in 1923 and grew up in Lisse, in the heart of the Netherlands. After World War II, he began working with the most obvious thing in Lisse – flower bulbs. He started exporting magnificent tulips, daffodils, dahlias, and many other flowers to the Scandinavian market.

In the 1970s, Georg sent his oldest son Johannes to Sweden to learn the language and prepare him to take over the company. Ten years later, he did just that and further developed the company to sell not only flower bulbs but also cut flowers and outdoor plants.

Erik Georg Hoekstra, Johannes’ first child, was born in Stockholm in 1988. He grew up with the family business. During his upbringing, he helped the family both in the flower fields in Lisse and with selling cut flowers in Sweden.

For seven years, Erik then worked at Plantagen with purchasing and assortment development for seeds and bulbs, until in 2020 he felt ready to return to his family’s roots. He then founded Florea, with a clear vision: to help people start gardening and experience the amazing feeling of seeing their own flowers, herbs, and vegetables grow. The idea behind Florea can be traced back to how Georg once started – with flower bulbs and seeds.

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Erik Hoekstra

Vision

Florea is a company founded on a strong vision - to inspire more people to start gardening.

For us, gardening is strongly associated with joy, but also with many other things. Gardening is good for both the gardener, society, and the planet as a whole.

Growing plants is a simple and rewarding way to take a break from everyday life, de-stress, and find peace. For us, it is important that gardening should be something carefree and that one should not see limitations but possibilities. You always decide when, where, and how much you want to grow, which in itself gives a feeling of freedom.

In addition, gardening contributes to a more sustainable life. More locally grown produce means fewer transportation emissions and less waste. More flowers provide food for bees and other pollinators.

We believe that everyone should have the chance to experience the difference between store-bought and homegrown. The taste of a freshly picked vegetable is something special. Eating a vegetable straight from the garden also means that it has not lost any nutrients or vitamins - something that transported vegetables always do.

Florea wants to be a source of inspiration for everyone who gardens and for those who have not yet started. We want to involve our customers in the entire journey - from seed to harvest. Above all, we want to dispel all the myths that gardening requires a lot of time, space, and knowledge - it's simple, and there is something that suits everyone!

Our product ultimately becomes a beautiful seed packet with a custom-designed illustration of the plant, packaged in paper made from recycled tomato plants. The seeds are of the highest quality and are always organic if possible.

A carefully selected assortment

With care and thought

When developing our assortment, we rely on a number of guiding principles. For us, gardening is about joy, and we want to showcase that by offering varieties that are fun, exciting, and challenging to grow. This, of course, is also based on the fact that all of our seeds, bulbs, and tubers are of the highest quality. By offering unique varieties with special characteristics, we want to inspire all of Sweden's home gardeners to achieve great things.

Our work is always based on a sustainability perspective and a concern for the planet. This permeates everything from the choice of packaging to which varieties we choose to include in our assortment. We always try to choose cultivation methods that take advantage of nature's cycles and require as little input as possible from the outside. We are very careful when choosing which growers to work with, and it is important that they share our sustainability perspective. Through our assortment, we want to promote biodiversity and inspire sustainable gardening.

Our assortment contains many new and exciting varieties for you to try. At the same time, we want to preserve all the fantastic, traditional plants we have grown for hundreds of years here in Sweden. That is why we also have a collection of heirloom plants.

All of our seeds are carefully selected and come with a quality and germination guarantee. We have, of course, grown all the varieties ourselves and tasted all the vegetables – which means that we can always stand behind our products one hundred percent.

We always try to challenge ourselves to find new and exciting seeds to expand our assortment with. If you have any questions about our assortment or perhaps suggestions for new varieties, do not hesitate to contact us!

Highest quality

We will do everything we can to help you succeed

Quality and satisfied customer guarantee

To always be able to guarantee the quality of our seeds, we regularly conduct a number of tests. Germination tests are conducted in laboratories and in test cultivations. In the laboratory, we also test purity - which is important to ensure high quality. All our tests are carried out according to the ISTA international standard.

In addition to these tests, we also grow all seeds in our own test garden - a so-called growth test. Only when we have smelled a flower or tasted a vegetable ourselves does it become part of our range. Every year we test a number of new varieties, in order to constantly keep our range broad and dynamic.

When you buy seeds from us, we always provide a satisfied customer guarantee.

Organic seeds

Our range of organic vegetable, flower, and herb seeds is close to our heart. Our organic seeds have the same high quality as all our products. The cultivation of organic seeds involves several technical challenges compared to the cultivation of conventional seeds, and crop failure is more common. Therefore, we work with reliable partners to guarantee availability.

The seeds are grown, cleaned, and inspected according to organic production standards. This means that we do not use any chemical pesticides and only use organic fertilizers. Of course, all our organic seeds are also non-GMO.

Meet the team

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