Mara Voss started Willow & Zonefield in the spring of 2017 out of a rented railway arch with a secondhand cold store and a van that needed jump-starting most mornings. She had spent four years working the wholesale floor at New Covent Garden Market, getting up at 3am three days a week, learning which growers were reliable and which ones padded their boxes with filler. When she left to start her own shop, she already had a list of farms she trusted and a clear idea of what she did not want to make: arrangements that looked expensive but felt like nothing.

Mara Voss trained informally on the wholesale floor at New Covent Garden Market from 2013 to 2016, working alongside buyers from some of London's larger florists before deciding she wanted to do things differently. She founded Willow & Zonefield in 2017 from a railway arch studio with a secondhand cold store and a van she still drives today. Before floristry she worked two seasons at a market garden in Cambridgeshire, which is where she developed a preference for growing-season logic over trend-driven buying. Outside the studio she runs a small allotment, reads a lot of garden history, and is slowly teaching herself to identify grasses by their seed heads.