Greening the rose

Can’t find a flower that’s fit for your perfect message? Roger East and Saskia Walzel go in quest of the ideal bouquet.

Organic roses. What better to express both love and natural purity? Well, perhaps you might not want to overdo the ‘purity’ theme for Valentine’s Day - but surely a must for Mother’s Day, the twin peak of the flower seller’s calendar. The florist must have masses to choose from.

Apparently not. Nothing doing. No demand. No demand? They must be joking. Is no-one bothered about the unappealing toxic cocktail of fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, nematocides and plant-growth regulators that goes into growing your standard clinically perfect florist’s offering?

Surely the advantages of organic flowers speak for themselves. Organic and fairtrade consultant Simon Wright can reel off quite a list - better quality, longer shelf-life and vase-life, environmental benefits where they are grown, healthier working conditions for the people who grow and pick them... Obviously our first florist just wasn’t switched on.

We’ll try elsewhere. The supermarkets. They dominate the cut flower market now, with a 40% market share between them. First stop, Somerfields. But they say organic flowers “aren’t a real possibility”! On account of their being ornamental products, “where presentation is the most important issue”...

Does Tesco offer hope? “As with any line, we will continue to be customer led - and will monitor whether this is something shoppers would like to see in store in the future.” In other words, nothing now. A familiar chicken-and-egg pattern begins to unfold...

Finally, at Waitrose, we find the only mainstream supermarket in the UK with its toe in the organic flower water. Not roses, admittedly. In fact, nothing outside the summer months - but for part of the year they do keep a couple of lines, based around sunflowers with some seasonal fillers. Buyer Luise Motala says they sell well, but there’s currently “no demand” for anything more ambitious.

The wholesalers? Sun King Flowers of Spalding must surely be sympathetic, seeing as they are heavily into fairtrade flowers. But no, organics aren’t on their radar at all. Technical manager Kay Clow puts it bluntly: “We’ve never thought about wholesaling them: there is no demand from the retailers.” Widening the search, it gets more positive.

Not at the Soil Association, where Eli Breen says they’ve never really looked into organic flowers - the old “lack of demand” thing again. But at the Flower and Plant Association they say they do sometimes get asked. Aha! So what’s their answer? “We tend to point people to farmers’ markets,” says Jemma Payne. Beyond that, their recommendation is to look at the environmental issues more widely - not just whether flowers are organically grown, but how far they have to travel, whether they’re grown in season...

Sound sense, we must admit. Local is the new green. And locally grown is also the main thrust at the website of Wiggly Wigglers, a pretty green-looking Herefordshire outfit with specialities in all kinds of funky composts, worms and stuff - as well as fresh flowers in season. At this time of year they’re bought in, and conventionally grown, but guaranteed British - tulips from Lincolnshire look especially good. And they will even do organic flowers, from their own cutting patch, from May-June through to about September.

“Locally grown organic flowers would be wonderful.”

“The chance to buy locally grown organic flowers would be wonderful,” enthuses Wright. He’s apparently one of the few people in this country who has actually looked into the market prospects. But, he warns, it’s a struggle on several counts. Most crucially, conventional flowers pose no proven health hazard for the consumer - so, like other non-food organic products, organic flowers don’t press the classic ‘health’ button with the public.

And the ‘altruism’ market? That, it seems, has been comprehensively captured by initiatives to secure fairer returns and ethical working conditions for growers in the global South. Fair enough. Fairtrade - there’s a trend that really has taken off. Fairtrade roses from Kenya were all the rage this Valentine’s Day. Vocal consumer demand was what triggered the launching of Tesco’s own brand of fairtrade flower, says its corporate social responsibility manager Joanna Grudgings.

Sainsburys is switching all its rose bouquets to fairtrade as part of its declared intention of becoming the UK’s leading fairtrade retailer. Asda sells fairtrade flowers too. Even the Dutch-based Florganic, the only European organic flower wholesaler (they supply Waitrose), is actually a subsidiary of Intergreen, who wholesale Ethical Trading Initiative certified flowers to Asda and Tesco. Ramp up the ethics, then, and give up on the organics except in summertime?

Not necessarily. The Americans haven’t. Over there, rising demand for organic flowers contrasts with flat sales for conventional cut flowers. This phenomenon is widely attributed to the marketing efforts of former organic food entrepreneur Gerald Prolman. Having brought the world’s first commercial crop of certified organic roses to market four years ago, he expanded his little dot.com flower business Organic Bouquet into a US-wide internet retailer and wholesaler, with a turnover last year of some $3 million.

And 70% of this is long-stemmed roses. Prolman, personally moved by the commitment of the organic flower growers he met, is the first to admit that “they needed help in marketing”. Which is, of course, where he comes in. His newly-announced intention of shipping to the UK, as well as opening a London office, suggests that he means to shake up the flower scene this side of the Atlantic too. Our demand for exotic ornamentals does mean these flowers are a truly global business.

Even Prolman’s organic flowers are mostly flown in from Latin America and Africa. The fact that the Department of Agriculture lets him bring them into the US, with its strict plant health and safety standards, does, incidentally, prove that there are effective manual and non-toxic methods of protecting flowers from insects and disease - whatever Somerfields might say. Even if they’re fairtrade or organic, though, these imports clock up a lot of air miles. Every flower flown from Kenya to the UK (300 million of them last year, and rising) causes nearly twice its own weight in CO2 emissions.

St Valentine’s and Mother’s Day fall so early in the year, that it’s imported roses or none at all for both the two biggest flower events of the year. You may well baulk at the carbon cost. You may prefer pot plants to cut flowers anyway. But, short of a quixotic campaign to get the dates switched to late summer, even dyed-in-the-wool old romantics do now have new choices. Ethical thoughtfulness, for one. And organic purity? Maybe next year.

8 March 2006

Roger East and Saskia Walzel