Sourcing DIY Wedding Flowers: Why Local, Why Organic

My family has a friend-family.  My parents have been friends with them for at least 35 years (!!), and us kids grew up together and went on vacations together and have stayed in touch.  The younger daughter, Abby, just got married a couple of weekends ago, and this was a big deal!  She is totally awesome (as in, hiked the Appalachian Trail awesome) so when my mom offered to provide and DIY the flowers for the wedding, of course I signed on to help!

I’m really looking forward to sharing a series of posts on DIY Wedding Flowers in the coming week or so about what goes into doing flowers for a good sized wedding.  I’ll be talking about how many you actually need, how you plan for it, supplies, tips for big arrangements, and how you make a bridal and bridesmaid bouquets.  My Mom was the true master-mind behind all of this, but I get to share it here because it is interesting stuff and also a great excuse to post a whole lot of pretty flower pictures!  (And because this is Plaster & Disaster, some real/less attractive process shots, too).  Look out for those posts coming very soon!

But before getting to the how-to, I wanted to share some things I learned about flowers and buying flowers in this process.  My mom is a champion for the environment and environmental health, and so she found a place to get beautiful, local, organic flowers for the wedding.

While local and organic food is getting pretty mainstream, applying those same ideas to flowers is still more of a fringe idea.  But it shouldn’t be.  True, we are less intimate with flowers than we are with food – i.e., we don’t eat them.  (Could I have thought of a less creepy way to say that?  Yes.)  However, that doesn’t mean that the impact on the environment and the health of others are not severe.  So let’s get into it a bit.  We’re really talking about two different things – local and organic – and both are important.

Why Local

Flowers are so fragile and temporary, that it really seems like a product that should be grown close to where it is consumed.  I guess I always just assumed that this was the case even though I had no evidence to support it!  So I was really surprised to learn that imported flowers account for about 64% of flower sales in the U.S.  These are mostly (78%) from Colombia, but a good amount come from Ecuador, as well.

The issue is the environmental impact of all of this.  On average, a bouquet will travel 1500 miles to come to a consumer in the U.S. – in refrigeration on trucks, sea containers, airplanes, etc.  In fact, the Scientific American reported that sending the roses for a typical Valentine’s Day produces approximately 9,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions… and a quick calculation puts that one day in context as the amount emitted by 1,500 cars over the course of a year.

And don’t think that the trade statistics mean that the remaining 36% are from the flower farm down the street… unless you live in California, where over 3/4 of our domestic flowers are grown.  These are generally grown in industrial greenhouses and then shipped all over the country.

All of this combines to mean that the bunch of flowers you buy in the grocery store or the arrangement delivered from the area florist – that ethereal, temporary thing that dies and is tossed within a couple weeks – comes with a really big carbon footprint.

Also, the result of all of this needed travel, is that flowers (much like fruits and vegetables) are being bred for their ability to hold up to long storage an voyages.  Just as this makes fruits and vegetables less flavorful and nutritious, the flowers we buy these days are less fragrant and less varied.  Bummer all around.

An Aside: The Global Flower Market

Feel free to totally skip this part.  I wasn’t planning on talking a lot the economics and economic history of flowers, but I found myself fascinated and going deeper and deeper as I did research for this, so I thought I’d share a few things here.  If you’re not interested, just skip on down to the next section!

I had no idea but floriculture (the name for the business of cut flowers, but also cut greenery, potted plants, and bulbs) is an immense business.  U.S. spending on flowers for Mothers Day alone is about $2.2 billion!  Historically, this was absolutely dominated by the Netherlands, and was the sector where we experienced the first economic bubble in the 1930s – hilariously called Tulip Mania.

The Netherlands are still very important, and about half of the worlds supply goes through there and the Dutch auction system which sets world prices.  Many of these very-short-lifespan products are shipped there to be inspected and bid on in person, before being shipped out again and sold elsewhere!  However, newer “flower powers” are Colombia, Ecuador, and Kenya, due to climates that are well suited for massive flower farming, and the low price of labor.  (Interestingly, even though these countries are exporting flowers, most of the plants the flowers come from are actually originally grown in the Netherlands and then are shipped as seedlings or cuttings.)  Most bouquets that you buy have done some serious international travel!

Because of distance, the U.S. doesn’t buy many Dutch (or Kenyan) flowers, and instead we get our flowers from Colombia and Ecuador – which are actually closer to the East Coast than California is, anyway.  The industry really took off there in the 1970s, but got a major boost in in 1991 when the U.S. agreed to not charge import taxes on flowers from South America as a way to encourage farmers to grow flowers rather than cocaine.

A whole infrastructure of cold-infusing equipment, cold containers, and cold rooms has been built out to transport flowers at 34 degrees to U.S. stores.  Transport by sea has become a big trend, because it is more affordable, sustainable, and technology has improved to do it with better climate control, which is making it easier for flowers to be traded not just internationally, but across the ocean.  (Fun fact: you can fit about 150,000 chrysanthemum stems into a 40 foot container.)

Why Organic

But the carbon footprint is only half the story.  The other half is that the flowers we buy are usually drenched in pesticides.

While in some ways working on a flower farm can be a job with decent wages where jobs are sorely needed, it also carries some significant health risks.  Setting aside the issues of sexual harassment, long hours, and repetitive stress injuries, workers are exposed to a lot of pesticides and chemicals in growing and packaging flowers to be sold internationally.  Workers have vision and breathing problems, dizziness, and illness.  Women who work in flower farms can see reduced fertility or development challenges for their children.

And it is not just the workers.  The pesticides and fertilizer can leak into the water supply and contaminate whole areas.

The flowers that come here – and that we love to have in our homes, to smell, and be around – are totally covered.  The amount of pesticide on imported flowers is not regulated since they are not eaten or grown here.  At the border, they are not tested for chemicals, just for bugs or fungus, and even one can cause big problems for the shipment.  Therefore, growers have a big incentive to make absolutely sure that there isn’t a single insect on their flowers and very little incentive not to cover them in with pesticides.  And this is what some literally do: dunking flowers head-first into pesticide/fungicide.

So while flowers seem like a carefree, natural, happy treat to buy, they really carry a whole hidden price-tag of environmental and health issues.  I’m NOT saying don’t buy flowers.  But perhaps we should be as conscious of the choices we are making when we buy flowers as we are when we buy food.

So what did we do when we needed a whole lot of flowers for the wedding?

Where we got our flowers: Stow Greenhouses

Despite the prevalence of imported flowers, local growers can be found!  And supporting them when you want flowers for a special occasion will only help them succeed and encourage more to grow locally. (Check out SlowFlowers.com to start with some sources.)  My mom found Stow Greenhouses, a small farm in our area which follows sustainable practices and doesn’t use pesticides.

Buying flowers for an event from a local farm is a little different than working with a big florist.  You don’t get to specify exactly what you want, as it is totally dependent on what is in bloom at that time.  Because we’re “planners,” we stopped by the farm the week before to help get an idea of what to expect.

It was really cool to visit!  Even thought it is a “small farm,” it is a big operation (from my perspective).  The owner, Barb, grows flowers in three acres of fields and a full acre greenhouse.  They employ 5 people year round, and a whole lot more in the summer, including sales staff for farmers markets and drivers for flower deliveries.

When you visit a flower farm, there are virtually no flowers to see.  If you look out a field and see colors other than green and brown, that means that they are doing something wrong!  Flowers are picked and used as soon as (or before) they bloom so that they will get to the buyer with the longest life on the table as possible.

Stow Greenhouses grows all sorts of flowers, but they specialize in lilies.  It was really cool to see rows and rows of lily plants, but not a single one in bloom.

They sell flowers through a lot of different channels – online, by subscription, CSA, at farmers markets, and in a cooler where people can drop by and buy bouquets any day.  However, the big business is in weddings.  They typically do full flowers for a wedding – as in make each arrangement, bouquet, and boutonniere by hand – each weekend day!  (I can tell you first hand, that is a whole lot of work.)

Barb was working on flowers for the next day while we were there, and her arrangements are beautiful!  I love the use of dogwood in the bouquet she put together.

They also sell for DIY wedding flowers, and will help you figure out how much you need so long as you’re willing to do all of the “putting together” yourself.  But more on that in a coming post!

Thanks for reading, and I hope you’re as excited to see the arrangements and bouquets that we made as I am to share them!  I’d love to hear – did you already know all this about where our flowers come from?  Do you to go any local sources near you, or just pick from your own garden?

Sharing at Home Matters and The Creative Gallery.