Why Buy Locally Grown Flowers?
When you order flowers online or pick up a bouquet at your local grocery store, do you ever think about where those flowers come from or how they were grown?
Flowers are beautiful and we love giving them because they help us to express and emphasize something profound: “I love you,” “I’m sorry,” “Thank you!”
We give them because their beauty helps us to say something that might be otherwise hard to say.
There’s even research that explains that our attraction to flowers comes from their role in our survival and evolution: “…the flowers signaled to our ancestors the presence of resources for the future, because over time the flowers often produce edible fruits and nuts.”
I don’t know about that, but it’s clear that a beautiful bouquet of flowers does something to improve our wellbeing. This is ironic because the modern floral industry, an industry worth $57.4 billion/year, is not good for our wellbeing at all. In fact, the modern floral industry is very polluting and is actively harming us.
How the floral industry is bad for people and planet:
Pesticides: Flowers look yummy to lots of different insects, so it might not surprise you that growing hundreds of thousands of perfect roses and carnations takes a lot of toxic pesticides to kill those insects.
Photo Credit: Raymond Cloyd
Eighty percent of the flowers that Americans buy come from outside the United States. The bulk of those flowers are grown in Colombia and Ecuador, which have even weaker regulations on pesticide use than we do here in the U.S.
However, there are no limits on pesticide residues for flowers that are imported into the U.S. In other words, those flowers you’re buying at the store might still have pesticides (that have been outlawed in the U.S. because of their toxicity) on their petals, leaves, and stems.
A number of studies have looked at florists’ exposure to pesticides. This study, for example, found that:
The exposure of florists appeared to be an example of a unique professional situation in which workers are exposed regularly to both a very high number of toxic chemicals and rather high concentration levels.
Research done in the communities surrounding those Ecuadorian and Colombian flower farms found environmental contamination of air, water, and soil. This contamination, of course, has a negative health impact on those communities:
Carbon emissions: As you might imagine, those flowers need to move quickly once they’ve been cut so they can arrive in grocery stores still looking fresh. They also need to be refrigerated during transport. This article tells us:
Stems may be transported up to 6,000 miles in refrigerated airplane holds. In 2018, Valentine’s Day flowers grown in Colombia and flown to US airports produced some 360,000 metric tons of CO2, according to estimates by the International Council on Clean Transportation. To put that into perspective, that’s roughly equivalent to 78,000 cars driven for one year.
I’m going to stop there with the negative environmental and human impacts because this is some depressing reading and I want to shift to solutions! But if you want more reading, I’ve put some links below.
Luckily, there are alternatives to this polluting industry!
Support local flower farmers! I’m a local flower farmer and would love to sell you flowers this growing season. This page will tell you how you can buy from me. There are also lots of flower farmers at local farmers’ markets.
You can grow your own! There are lots of easy-to-grow flowers that the deer won’t eat. I posted about them here and here. (I noticed that I didn’t include zinnias in those lists, and that is one of the all-time easiest flowers to grow that deer don’t usually eat. Just check out all the varieties here: Johnny’s Seeds.)
In Michigan, fresh local flowers are only available seasonally, but what about dried flowers, or even paper flowers? They can be beautiful! For example, check out these arrangements: Unwilted. Gorgeous! Looks like they’re even based in Michigan.
Blooming ‘burbs Update: baby plants, grown with love and without pesticides
It won’t be long until these are transplanted into the garden and making birds, bees, and people happy.
