Grief, supply chains, plastic in the waterways, and the forgotten language of flowers. Inside the slow, imperfect, frequently moving effort to make the year’s biggest floral event a little more honest
The peonies arrived on a Tuesday, which is earlier than Marta Kowalska expected, and she is kneeling on the floor of her shop in Bristol sorting through them stem by stem, checking the buds, deciding which are two days from opening and which will need a week. The shop is called Commonplace Flowers, and it is not a large shop. It has the quality of a room someone has thought carefully about: the walls are the colour of old putty, the vessels are mismatched and beautiful, and there is a small chalkboard near the door that says, simply, everything here was grown in Britain.
The peonies are from a farm in Worcestershire. The ranunculus — nearly finished now, it’s late May — came from a grower in the Wye Valley who Kowalska has been buying from since she opened three years ago. The sweet peas on the workbench arrived yesterday from a family farm in Lincolnshire and smell, she says, the way sweet peas are supposed to smell, which is to say extraordinarily, the kind of smell that makes you stop whatever you’re doing and just stand there.
“People come in and they put their face in the bucket,” she says, not unkindly. “They haven’t smelled a proper sweet pea in years. Most of them have forgotten what the flower actually is.”
What the flower actually is — what it has been for most of human history, before the air freight and the promotional calendar and the cellophane — is what Kowalska thinks about a lot. She came to floristry from food, specifically from a decade spent working in and around the restaurant industry, where the question of where something came from had long since stopped being optional. “In food, provenance became the conversation,” she says. “It happened slowly, then suddenly. I think flowers are about five years behind.”
A very brief history of the flower as message
The forget-me-not did not get its name by accident. Neither did the pansy — its name derives from the French pensée, thought, which is why it appears in Hamlet as the flower of remembrance. The marigold was associated with grief in the medieval period. The white lily with purity. The red rose with ardour. The cypress, which does not flower, with mourning.
The language of flowers — floriography, as it was formally named in the nineteenth century — was not a Victorian invention, though the Victorians systematised it with characteristic thoroughness. Charlotte de Latour’s Le Langage des Fleurs, published in Paris in 1819 and translated and adapted repeatedly throughout the century, codified centuries of accumulated botanical symbolism into something close to a grammar: a system through which a carefully composed bouquet could constitute a complete emotional statement, deliverable in polite society without the sender having to say a word.
“It was a technology of indirection,” says Dr Harriet Vane, a cultural historian at the University of Bristol who has spent the past decade researching the material culture of nineteenth-century feeling. “A woman who could not openly declare love, or grief, or anger, could send a bouquet that said it precisely, to someone who knew how to read it. It was a coded language that operated right under the noses of people who didn’t have the key.”
The objects that encoded this system still exist — in museum collections, in archive boxes, in the backs of antique shops. Pressed flower albums in which specimens are arranged by meaning rather than taxonomy, so that you read the page as a sentence rather than a catalogue. Hand-painted porcelain posy holders designed to carry small composed bunches of flowers whose selection was as deliberate as any written declaration. Embroidered panels in which the combination of roses, heartsease, and forget-me-nots spelled out something private in a medium that could hang on a drawing room wall.
“What’s striking,” Vane says, “is the emotional sophistication of it. These were not people who thought of flowers as decoration. They were people who thought of flowers as communication — as a vehicle for saying things that were otherwise unsayable.”
The industrial cut flower trade of the twentieth century did not simply commercialise this tradition. It flattened it. It reduced the complex, culturally literate language of flowers to a handful of interchangeable gestures — red rose for love, white lily for sympathy, mixed bouquet for the occasion that doesn’t require further thought — and sold the gestures at volume. The shelf life of meaning turned out to be considerably shorter than the shelf life of a refrigerated carnation.
Where the flowers come from
There is a number that tends to surprise people when they hear it: roughly 80% of cut flowers sold in the United Kingdom are imported.
Most of them fly. From Kenya, Colombia, Ecuador, Ethiopia, and the Netherlands, in refrigerated cargo holds, to distribution centres, to regional wholesalers, to shops, to doorsteps. Air freight is, by most calculations, the most carbon-intensive commercial transport mode in routine use. The environmental cost of a bunch of roses delivered to a British door is substantially greater than the price of the bunch reflects.
The social costs of the same supply chain are equally uncomfortable to examine. Large-scale cut flower farms in the global south have been subject to sustained criticism for decades, on grounds of wage levels, pesticide exposure, and the conditions of workers — predominantly women — who grow the flowers that end up on British high streets. Certification schemes exist: Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, Veriflora. The proportion of UK-sold flowers carrying credible certification remains limited.
These facts are not obscure. They have been reported at intervals since at least the 1980s. They have simply not been the kind of thing that the industry’s promotional materials have found occasion to mention — which is itself worth noting.
Sandra Osei-Bonsu farms cut flowers on three acres of Lincolnshire fenland. She grows dahlias, sweet peas, zinnias, ammi, scabious, and more varieties of ranunculus than she can easily list, on soil that she has been improving for seven years since she left a career in public sector management and decided, after a long period of what she describes as “having absolutely no idea what to do next,” to try growing something.
“I’d been buying flowers my whole life,” she says, “without ever thinking about where they came from. And then I started growing them and I thought: this is insane. We’re flying plants across the world when we have perfectly good soil right here.”
She sells to florists within a 60-mile radius. She doesn’t sell to supermarkets, which she says have a procurement model incompatible with the kind of growing she does — seasonally variable, weather-dependent, committed to varieties chosen for beauty and scent rather than uniformity and transit life. Her sweet peas, which she cuts in the early morning while the dew is still on them, go to Kowalska in Bristol and two other florists in Nottingham and Sheffield, who all know her name and phone her in April to ask what’s coming.
“The provenance thing matters,” she says, “but it’s not just politics. The flower is actually better. It’s fresher. It hasn’t been in a cold room for a week. It smells like a flower.”
The green brick problem
Beneath most commercial floral arrangements — beneath the sweet peas and the peonies and the roses and the spray carnations — there is, or has been until recently, a block of green plastic.
Floral foam is made from phenol-formaldehyde, and it has been a staple of the professional floristry industry since 1954. It holds stems in position, absorbs water, and makes possible the kind of precise, architectural arrangements that define the commercial floral aesthetic. It is also, as research published in Science of the Total Environment in 2019 by scientists at RMIT University in Melbourne confirmed, an environmental problem of considerable specificity. It does not biodegrade. It breaks down into microplastics that enter waterways and are ingested by aquatic invertebrates. The chemicals it leaches are, the research found, more toxic to freshwater invertebrates than those from most other plastic families. A standard block contains the plastic equivalent of ten carrier bags. Florists who use it daily are exposed, as a routine occupational matter, to formaldehyde, barium sulphates, and carbon black.
The Royal Horticultural Society banned it from their competitive shows in 2023. Professional florists committed to sustainable practice — Blooming Haus in London, the first florist in the world to achieve both Planet Mark and B Corp certification, is among the most prominent — have eliminated it entirely. Plastic-free alternatives are entering the market.
Kowalska hasn’t used floral foam since she opened. “I learned on a kenzan,” she says — referring to the small, heavy, pin-studded disc used in Japanese ikebana that was the standard tool before foam displaced it in Western floristry. “I didn’t know there was a different way. And then I found out about the foam and I thought: good, I didn’t want to use it anyway.”
She works with chicken wire, kenzans, moss, and the structural logic of the stems themselves. The arrangements, she says, take slightly longer to construct and require more thought about how the flowers will hold each other. “But they look better,” she says, simply. “When you can’t just shove a stem into foam at any angle, you have to think about where it actually wants to go.”
What the shop window says
Walk past most florists’ windows in the first two weeks of March, and you will receive a clear and consistent message. The message is: celebrate. The pink, the yellow, the cheerful, the abundant. The bundles tied with ribbon, the arrangements that photograph well, the subject lines in the promotional emails that say things like treat her — she deserves it and the perfect gift for the most important person in your life.
The message is not wrong, for the people it’s intended for. For the person with a living mother and a warm relationship and an unclouded desire to mark the day, the pink and the yellow are exactly right.
But they are not right for everyone. And the gap between the customer the floristry industry imagines and the customers who are actually walking past the window — with their grief and their fertility treatment and their estrangements and their complicated relationships and their mothers who were difficult or absent or harmful or simply gone — has been, until recently, a gap the industry preferred not to think about.
One in six couples experience difficulty conceiving at some point. Miscarriage affects approximately one in four recognised pregnancies. Bereavement does not resolve on a calendar schedule: the second or third Mothering Sunday after a loss can be harder than the first, as the initial support structures withdraw and the permanence of absence becomes more, not less, undeniable. These are not small or unusual categories of human experience. They describe a substantial portion of the people receiving Mother’s Day promotional emails every March.
The most visible response to this came from Bloom & Wild, the London-based online florist, which in 2019 sent an email offering customers the option to opt out of all Mother’s Day marketing communications. No explanation required. Almost 18,000 people took the option and many more wrote back to the company with letters that all said, in various ways, the same thing: thank you for noticing us. Social media engagement quadrupled. The company formalised the approach into the Thoughtful Marketing Movement, which now has more than 100 participating brands and has attracted parliamentary attention: Matt Warman MP raised the issue in the Commons, citing personal experience of bereavement, and called for a voluntary advertising code.
The idea has spread outward from there, taken up by independent florists who arrived at similar conclusions by different routes.
Memory arrangements and the florist who gets it
Adaeze Okonkwo started working with flowers after her mother died.
“It wasn’t a plan,” she says. She’s sitting in the small studio she runs in Hackney, east London, which she opened two years ago after a period of what she describes as trying various things and not feeling quite right about any of them. “I just found that being around flowers helped. And then I found that arranging them helped more. And then I thought: this is what I want to do.”
Her studio, which she called Tender, works primarily with locally grown and British-sourced flowers. But the thing that has drawn attention to it — and that she talks about with a careful, particular warmth — is what she started doing in the weeks around Mothering Sunday last year.
She offers what she calls memory posies: small, quiet arrangements, in muted colours, available without explanation, for people who are marking the day rather than celebrating it. No pink. No yellow. Forget-me-nots when she can get them. Hellebores in the deep plum and near-black shades. White narcissus. Sweet violet, when it’s in season.
“I didn’t advertise it as a grief thing,” she says. “I just put them in the window with a small card that said: for those who are remembering. That was it.” She pauses. “The first person who came in and asked for one — she just started crying. Not in a bad way. More like relief, I think. She said she’d been walking past florists’ windows for two weeks feeling like she didn’t exist.”
The woman’s mother had died the previous October. She wanted something to put on the grave.
“I made her something with hellebores and a few forget-me-nots and some rosemary — rosemary for remembrance, which people have known about since Shakespeare — and some trailing ivy. Nothing bright. Nothing celebratory. Just something that acknowledged what the day was for her.”
She charged the same as any other arrangement. The woman came back the following week to say that it had been exactly right.
“That’s the job,” Okonkwo says. “Not to decide for people what they’re feeling. Just to make room for whatever they’ve got.”
Who the holiday excludes
The representational dimensions of Mother’s Day marketing are, to the critical eye, fairly glaring.
The industry’s standard visual vocabulary — a woman, typically white, typically middle-aged, typically arranged in a domestic setting of some comfort, receiving flowers from children whose genetic relationship to her is visually implied — has not changed enormously in several decades. It excludes, by default and without obvious intention, a considerable number of the people who participate in the holiday or who are affected by it.
The same-sex couple in which both partners are mothers. The trans woman who is a mother. The grandmother who has, in practice, been the primary carer for years. The father raising children alone. The aunt who stepped in. The person whose mother is very much alive but with whom they have not had contact for reasons that are complicated and painful and not available for public discussion.
“The marketing assumes a very particular kind of family,” says Dr Vane, the cultural historian. “And that family — the nuclear, heterosexual, warm, intact, uncomplicated family — is considerably less universal than the promotional calendar implies. The irony is that flowers themselves have a much richer tradition of representing complicated feeling. The industry has just chosen not to use it.”
The florists who are addressing this tend to be the same florists who are addressing the supply chain and the floral foam. The correlation is not accidental. The quality of attention that asks where did this stem come from, and what did it cost to produce? tends to be the same quality of attention that asks who is standing in front of me, and what do they actually need?
Kowalska, in Bristol, retrained her staff after a customer came in the day before Mothering Sunday and was asked, by a well-meaning member of staff, what she was getting for her mum.
“She had just lost her mother,” Kowalska says. “Six weeks before. And she’d come in specifically because she wanted flowers for the grave, and the first thing she was asked was that question. She handled it with more grace than I would have.” She pauses. “We don’t ask that anymore. We ask: how can I help you?”
Okonkwo goes further. She changed the language throughout her shop in the weeks around Mothering Sunday. Not the celebratory messaging, which she kept — the celebration is real, and it matters — but she added alongside it. The memory posies. A small card near the door that reads: whatever this weekend holds for you, we’re here. A note on the website offering the option to opt out of promotional emails. And, in the window: the forget-me-nots.
“I get people coming in who’ve had miscarriages,” she says. “Who’ve been trying to have children for years. Who’ve lost their mums recently or a long time ago. Who have difficult relationships with their mothers and find the whole thing basically unbearable. These people exist. They’re not a niche.” She looks at the bucket of sweet peas on the workbench. “They deserve flowers too. Just — different flowers. And someone who asks what they need before assuming they know.”
The supply chain conversation
The environmental and ethical dimensions of the cut flower trade are, in Britain in 2025, increasingly a consumer conversation rather than a specialist one. This is partly the result of a decade of Slow Flowers advocacy — the movement founded in the United States by Debra Prinzing in 2013 and mirrored in Britain by a growing network of local growers and independent studios — and partly the result of the broader cultural shift toward provenance awareness that has, as Kowalska notes, moved through food and is now moving through flowers.
Osei-Bonsu, in Lincolnshire, fields questions about growing practices from her florist customers regularly. She farms without pesticides, improves her soil with compost and green manures, and has been transitioning her seed sourcing toward British and heritage varieties. “People ask because they want to be able to tell their own customers,” she says. “The story matters. They’re not just buying flowers. They’re buying something they can talk about.”
This is, in a sense, the commercial dimension of what Dr Vane describes as the historical language of flowers: the restoration of meaning to the object. The flower that comes with a story — that was grown in this soil, by this person, under these conditions, using these practices — carries something that the anonymous import cannot. It carries provenance. And provenance, in the language of flowers as in the language of food and craft, is a form of meaning.
The locally grown sweet pea on Sandra Osei-Bonsu’s Lincolnshire farm, cut at five in the morning while the dew is still on it, driven to Bristol in a refrigerated van, placed in water in Kowalska’s shop, and bought by a customer who knows where it came from: this is not simply a better environmental choice than the Ecuadorean rose that flew into Heathrow. It is, in the terms that the language of flowers has always used, a more communicative one.
The flower for complicated feelings
There is a tradition, older than any promotional calendar, of giving flowers at moments that resist easy categorisation. The flowers placed at a roadside memorial by strangers who never met the person who died. The bunch brought to a hospital by someone who can’t find words. The arrangement sent after a miscarriage, or a divorce, or any of the dozens of experiences that the greeting card industry has never quite figured out how to address.
Adaeze Okonkwo thinks about this tradition a lot. “Flowers are for the hard things as much as the good things,” she says. “They’ve always been. People just forgot.”
The forget-me-not is perhaps the most explicit example. Its name is its entire communicative function, and it has been performing that function across European cultures for at least seven hundred years — in medieval poetry, in Romantic painting, in the handkerchiefs embroidered by soldiers’ wives, in the badge of the Alzheimer’s Society, in the small pot on the windowsill of someone who needs to feel that they have not been forgotten.
As a cut flower, it is modest. It does not make a dramatic statement. Its stems are thin, its blooms are small, its vase life is limited to a few days. It does not show well in a promotional photograph. It does not photograph neutrally on a white background.
It says, in its name, the one thing that many of the people walking past florists’ windows in the first weeks of May most need to hear.
Okonkwo grows them in her small back garden in Hackney, because the commercial supply for forget-me-nots is limited and she wants to be sure she has them when she needs them. This year she cut them and placed them in the shop window on the first of March, a full two weeks before Mothering Sunday.
“Someone came in the same day,” she says. “Older woman. She didn’t want anything big. She just wanted a few stems of the forget-me-nots and something green. She said her daughter had died two years ago and she wanted to put something on the grave that wasn’t one of those pink things from the supermarket.”
She pauses.
“I made her a small bunch. Forget-me-nots, a bit of rosemary, a few stems of sweet violet. I tied it with some natural twine. It cost her six pounds.”
She looks at the bunch in the window.
“She came back afterwards and said thank you. Said it was exactly right.”
The view from the field
Sandra Osei-Bonsu is standing in her field in Lincolnshire at the end of a long day in late May, looking at the sweet peas that need picking tomorrow morning.
“People think of flowers as a luxury,” she says. “And they can be. But they’re also just — plants. Growing things. There’s nothing very complicated about it, really. You put the seed in the ground, you give it water, you try not to kill it. And then this happens.” She gestures at the rows of sweet peas, which are pink and purple and white and cream in the low evening light, and which smell of something that has no name except sweet pea.
She has been thinking about Mother’s Day — about what the industry does with it and what she thinks it could do instead. She sells to florists who try to tell the story of where the flowers came from. She’s beginning to develop a small direct-to-consumer offer for people who want to send locally grown flowers as gifts and know the name of the farm.
“I think people want something real,” she says. “They’re tired of the fake abundance. The perfect flower that smells of nothing. The arrangement that looks like a photograph of an arrangement.” She pulls a sweet pea stem and holds it up. “This is what a flower is. It’s here right now, it won’t be here next week, it came from this specific bit of ground. That’s the story.”
It is, also, the original story — the one that the language of flowers was always telling, before the promotional calendar simplified it. That this flower, chosen for this reason, given to this person, at this particular and unrepeatable moment: means this.
The industry is learning, slowly and imperfectly and occasionally in ways that mistake the gesture for the substance, to tell it again.
Back in Bristol, Kowalska has finished sorting the peonies. She puts the last of them in water and straightens up and looks at the shop, which smells of sweet peas and peonies and something cold and green underneath — the living smell of the water the stems are drinking.
She has a small card printed near the till that reads: for whoever you’re thinking of this Mothering Sunday — with love.
She wrote it herself. She wrote several versions before she got to that one. She wanted to say as little as possible, and mean as much as possible, and leave room for everyone.
“Flowers are good at room,” she says, picking up an errant sweet pea stem and adding it to a bucket. “You just have to let them.”