Giving flowers to the living is not a grand gesture here. It is a daily walk across the hill, a pair of hands that know where the anthuriums grow near the cottages, where the ginger lilies lean white and green beside the old spa, where the red roses quietly open down at the mango spa. It is the quiet labour of someone who has spent nine years learning that a hillside, if you know how to listen to it, will give you everything you need.
Her name is Karen Phillip, from St. Peter's — a quiet parish, she will tell you, full of green and grass and people who love to get their hands dirty. She came to Belle Mont Sanctuary Resort from the engineering department. Today, she is Landscape Assistant Manager. The hill made her into something she did not expect.
A Hill in Full Bloom
The flowers at Belle Mont Sanctuary Resort are not ordered from a catalogue. They are foraged — walked for, sought out, gathered from across the property's vast landscape. Karen begins close to the cottages, where the anthuriums grow in abundance. She moves to where the old spa once stood, collecting ginger lilies. She works her way down to the event space, to the new spa, building her arrangements from what the land offers that day.
All the flowers are not in one spot, they're all over the property. So once you know where they are, you go and collect them.
There is nothing artificial in what she puts together. No silk, no filler, nothing imported. Every arrangement is real — cut from the volcanic hillside, carried down by hand, placed where guests will find them.
They love the nature of it. It's real. There's nothing fake. Nothing artificial. It's real.
The Community Behind the Bloom
When the weather turns and the hillside withholds — when the climate decides that this week there will be no anthuriums, no ginger lilies, nothing to work with — Karen does not stop. She goes home. She goes to her neighbours in St. Paul's.
If I go down there and ask them for two pieces of flowers, they do give me some. This is a nice community. We all work together to get it done.
This is something that cannot be manufactured in a resort. The fact that the flowers on your table or bed may have come from a neighbour's garden two miles down the hill — that they carry in them the generosity of a community that takes pride in this place — is exactly the kind of detail that makes Belle Mont Sanctuary Resort what it is.
When the Hill Dresses for an Occasion
The event space at Belle Mont Sanctuary Resort does not arrive pre-decorated. It arrives as a hillside — open air, volcanic soil, the Caribbean Sea in the distance. What transforms it into a wedding venue, a conference setting, a celebration space, is in large part Karen's work.
She knows what the property holds for every occasion. Arcade plants for structure. Yellow birds of paradise for colour. Anthuriums for elegance. Ginger lilies for something softer. She builds each arrangement around what the hill is offering that week — no two events ever quite the same, because no two weeks on the hillside are identical.
That is the difference between decoration and intention. Karen Phillip brings intention. And when your guests walk into that space and stop — when they reach for their phones or simply stand still for a moment — that is the hill, dressed by hands that know it well, doing what it has always done best.
Nine Years, and Still Learning
Karen will tell you she is not a flower person by training. She came from engineering. She learned on the job, season by season, plant by plant, guest comment by guest comment.
I'm not a flower experience person, but now I've been working here for nine years, I'm at it. I love it now. I'll continue doing it.
Nine years on a hill will do that. Every guest who stops to comment on an arrangement, every new culture she encounters, every plant whose name she learns in a language she did not speak before — these things accumulate into something that looks, from the outside, a lot like mastery.
When other people come and comment on the plants, it makes me more proud to do it more and make it more.
Giving flowers to the living is an old idea. What Karen Phillip has done at Belle Mont Sanctuary Resort is make it feel like it could only happen here — on this hill, with these plants, tended by these hands, in this community. That is not a small thing. That is the whole thing.