Humble Umbel Farm

Anna Alexandre (she/Her)

Anna’s love affair with farming started in her high school days, the moment she came across an old abandoned greenhouse in their school lot. That greenhouse quickly blossomed into a community garden, and that community garden quickly exploded into a life-long passion for cultivating plants & community.

After traveling up & down the east coast for 6 years, working on organic farms, studying herbal medicine (her other greatest life passion), and growing every botanical curiosity she could get her hands on, Anna is now so excited to be in back in her home state offering fresh blooms and good food to the Triangle area.

Anna wears many hats & has her hands in many pots! Anna holds down the flower & herb operation at Humble Umbel Farm, while also managing the veggies with Brian. You’ll most likely catch Anna tending to the babies in the green house, harvesting flowers & herbs in the field, preparing new ground for planting, or ogling over new seed catalogs.

Brian Conner (He/Him)

Brian grew up on the shores of the Great Lakes. His passion for plants really began while studying environmental science at Northern Michigan University, and roaming the north woods in search of wild edibles and wild flowers. Becoming acutely aware of the environmental and social woes of civilization, he realized that there were great solutions to be found in our relationship with nature, and that plants and food lie in the heart of it all. He became driven to understand the landscape, its forests and soils, and to collaborate and work with others to find positive, regenerative, accessible, low-tech solutions to heal land and people.

He has spent most of the last decade living in the Southeast and Puerto Rico working with organic farms, homesteads, and edible landscaping companies, and learning from botanists and foragers. He humbly refers to himself as an ecological farmer, forager, ethnobotanist, permaculturist, and student of soil and plant health. And he wants to share food and ideas with you!

At Humble Umbel Farm, Brian heads up the vegetable side of things, as well as our market garden systems, and cutting edge ecological farming practices.

The dynamic Duo

Anna and Brian met while working on a small farm just outside Asheville, NC. After having known each other just a few short weeks, they decided on a whim to road trip across the country together. By week two of the journey, having discovered how deep their mutual love of plants was & their desire to live in relationship with the land, they were already planning their farm together. For years they talked nothing but farm hopes and dreams (and plants, of course). In 2017, they moved back to Anna’s hometown area, where they’re putting down permanent roots and kindling forever farm dreams! In 2018 they launched Humble Umbel Farm just outside of Hillsborough NC.