A cut above: Britain’s blossoming slow flower movement

Author: Lucy Purdy / Source: Positive News

British flower growers report fresh demand for their home-grown blooms. We ask a Somerset-based florist and flower farmer: why is native flora gaining ground?

“It feels as though the world is all mine,” says Georgie Newbery, describing spending early mornings in her flower patch.

Packed with native English blooms, her fields hum with bees and butterflies at this time of year, while in the winter she watches charms of goldfinches feeding on the aphids that over-winter in the willow.

Together with her husband, artist Fabrizio Bocco, Newbery runs Common Farm Flowers in Somerset. When it all began 14 years ago, they didn’t strictly decide to set up a flower farm but wanted to create a haven for wildlife.

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“It had to be paid for – therefore, we run a flower farm,” explains Newbery, with a smile. “Fabrizio’s line, ‘Look after the invertebrates and the rest of the food chain will look after itself,’ is at the root of what we do here.”

Bearing in mind that producing beautiful flowers wasn’t their chief motivation, the pair are doing pretty well. As both growers and florists, their business uses about 250,000 stems of flowers every year. All are grown in the UK and include varieties that the huge international flower companies mostly avoid: the likes of wild buttercups, scented sweet peas, heavy-headed garden roses and delicate umbellifers that don’t travel well out of water.

The global flower industry is a behemoth, with gigantic international firms flying planes packed with stems out of countries such as Venezuela and Colombia to serve the northern European and US markets.

Aside from the air miles – the planes often fly back empty – the costs of growing the flowers are hefty: from the huge drain on often scarce water resources, to the dependency of local communities on monocultures. Because they are not designed to be eaten, authorities generally don’t check flowers for pesticides, which may still be impacting growers, workers and ecosystems.