The Greenhouse Effect
Mother's Day is the second-biggest flower-buying event on earth. Behind every bouquet lies a planetary toll that the industry doesn't want you to calculate.
"We think of them as gestures of kindness or empathy or affection. But the reality of the global flower industry is that the bulk of our flowers are grown in the Global South and transported worldwide in refrigerated cargo jets and trucks, wrapped in plastic, and arranged in toxic floral foam." — Becky Feasby, sustainable florist and sustainability researcher, Harvard University
There is a particular quality to the hope embedded in a Mother's Day bouquet. Unlike the contractual obligation of Valentine's roses or the solemnity of funeral flowers, the bunch of peonies or mixed blooms bought for a mother carries something warmer — gratitude, perhaps, or the attempt to express a love that doesn't otherwise know how to say itself out loud. The gesture is nearly universal. In the United States, 84 per cent of adults plan to celebrate Mother's Day in some form, and flowers rank as the number one gift, ahead of greeting cards, special meals, and jewellery. Americans were expected to spend an average of $254 per person on Mother's Day gifts in 2024, with cut flowers accounting for a significant slice of that total. In the US alone, Mother's Day accounts for 26 per cent of all holiday purchases of cut and potted flowers — ranking second only to Valentine's Day in the global flower calendar, ahead of Christmas, weddings, and funerals combined.
The global cut flower industry is worth an estimated $55 billion annually, and Mother's Day is one of its two load-bearing columns. The second Sunday of May is, in the language of the industry, the Superbowl for Florists — a date celebrated in over 90 countries, spanning a consumer base far broader and more demographically diverse than any other floral event. The scale of consumption it generates is staggering. The logistics required to service it are extraordinary. And the environmental cost, accumulated across every link in the chain from Colombian soil to British kitchen table, is something the industry has spent considerable energy ensuring most buyers never sit with long enough to compute.
This is the computation the flower trade does not want you to make. Let us make it.
A Gift That Has Travelled Further Than You Have
Start with geography, because geography is where the environmental story begins.
The flowers that most people will buy for their mothers this May did not grow locally. In the United Kingdom, approximately 90 per cent of all cut flowers are imported. In the United States, the figure is around 80 per cent. In continental Europe, the numbers are similar. This is not a recent development — it has been the structural reality of the global flower trade for several decades, since the combination of cheap equatorial land, available labour, and the invention of reliable refrigerated air freight made it economically rational to grow flowers in Colombia, Ecuador, and Kenya and sell them in New York, London, and Amsterdam.
Colombia is the world's single largest producer of cut flowers, exporting an estimated 660 million stems a year. Ecuador follows closely, its Andean highlands producing blooms of exceptional size and colour under near-perfect growing conditions. Kenya has emerged as the dominant African producer, shipping around 150,000 tonnes annually, primarily to Europe. Ethiopia is expanding rapidly. The Netherlands remains the clearinghouse through which a large proportion of globally traded flowers pass — the Amsterdam Aalsmeer auction complex, one of the largest buildings on earth by footprint, handles roughly 12 billion stems a year — but the Dutch no longer grow most of what they sell. Their role is financial, logistical, and commercial. The growing happens in the tropics.
For Mother's Day in May, this global geography creates a specific set of conditions quite different from Valentine's Day in February. February is the northern hemisphere's deepest winter: every rose flying from Bogotá to Miami or from Nairobi to Amsterdam is making an unambiguous journey from a warm growing climate to a cold consumer one, and the case for importing is clear. May, by contrast, is spring in the northern hemisphere. Gardens are flowering. Fields are coming into bloom. There are flowers growing, locally and seasonally, in the countries where Mother's Day bouquets will be bought. And yet the industry continues to fly them from the equator, because the economics of scale, established infrastructure, and consumer expectations of cosmetically perfect, year-round availability have made domestic alternatives commercially marginal. The seasonal argument for imported May flowers is considerably weaker than the seasonal argument for imported February roses. The environmental cost is the same.
Flying Water Around the World
A fresh-cut rose is, in its physical composition, approximately 80 to 90 per cent water. It is, in a meaningful sense, a small container of liquid wrapped in a thin layer of organic matter. Transporting it from a farm in Kenya to a florist in Sheffield requires keeping that water cool, keeping it moving through a chain of refrigerated trucks, cold stores, cargo aircraft, and more refrigerated trucks, and delivering it to its destination while it still appears — to the demanding eye of a supermarket buyer — to be in perfect condition. It is, in the words of Dr Michael Williams, an environmental scientist at Imperial College London who has studied the carbon footprint of the cut flower industry, essentially "flying water and air around the world."
The carbon mathematics of this operation are stark. Air freight generates between 500 and 1,500 grams of CO2 per tonne-kilometre. Maritime shipping generates approximately 8 to 40 grams per tonne-kilometre — making ocean transport somewhere between 80 and 150 times less carbon-intensive per unit of cargo. Rail transport falls somewhere in between, roughly 200 times more efficient than air. This enormous differential between modes of transport is the single most important number in the environmental accounting of the flower industry, and it is a number the industry has historically been able to ignore because the perishability of cut flowers has made air freight the only practical option for most shipments.
A single Kenyan rose travelling to London generates approximately 2.5 to 3 kilograms of CO2 — roughly equivalent to driving a small car 15 to 20 kilometres, or charging a smartphone 250 times. For Colombian roses reaching Europe, the figure climbs to 3.5 to 4 kilograms per stem, as the journey spans two continents. A single imported bouquet of twelve roses, purchased at a British supermarket for Mother's Day, carries a carbon footprint of somewhere between 30 and 50 kilograms of CO2. To put that in context: a 2020 analysis of products sold in British grocery stores by climate researcher Mike Berners-Lee found that an imported flower bouquet carries a larger carbon impact than an eight-ounce steak raised on deforested land in Brazil and consumed in London. The steak travels by ship. The flowers travel by plane.
Valentine's Day flowers grown in Colombia and flown to US airports in 2018 produced an estimated 360,000 metric tonnes of CO2 — the equivalent of approximately 78,000 cars driven for a full year. The figure for Mother's Day is proportionally comparable: the US holiday generates approximately 26 per cent of annual holiday flower purchases, and much of that demand is met by imported blooms moving through the same air freight channels as their February equivalents. Global estimates for Mother's Day flower transportation emissions typically run into the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of CO2 equivalent. It is one of the most carbon-intensive acts of gifting in the consumer calendar.
The Dutch Paradox: When Local Doesn't Mean Green
The instinctive assumption — that buying flowers grown closer to home must be better for the environment — runs directly into one of the most counterintuitive findings in the environmental literature on floriculture, and one that the industry regularly misuses.
In 2007, researchers at Cranfield University published what became a landmark analysis of the carbon footprint of cut flower production. They found that raising 12,000 Kenyan roses produced approximately 13,200 pounds of CO2. The equivalent number grown in a heated Dutch hothouse produced approximately 77,160 pounds. Dutch roses carry roughly six times the carbon footprint of Kenyan roses, because growing flowers in the Netherlands in winter requires enormous quantities of energy — primarily natural gas — to heat and light the greenhouses in a country that sits at 52 degrees north latitude, where winters are grey, cold, and long.
The scale of this energy consumption is remarkable. Dutch greenhouse horticulture — vegetables, pot plants, and cut flowers combined — consumes approximately 9 per cent of the Netherlands' total natural gas supply. A 2022 analysis by ABN AMRO bank found that in terms of energy consumption and costs, running at approximately 1.3 billion euros annually, the greenhouse horticulture sector sits alongside the chemical industry and oil refineries as one of the Netherlands' most energy-intensive industries. Three-quarters of that energy comes from natural gas, most of it used in combined heat and power installations that simultaneously heat the greenhouses and generate electricity for the grid. The Dutch greenhouse sector is, in effect, a fossil fuel industry that produces flowers as a by-product of burning gas.
The Dutch government and the horticultural sector have jointly committed to fossil-free cultivation by 2040. Progress is being made — the sector has improved energy efficiency significantly over the past two decades, and geothermal and residual heat are increasingly being deployed. But in 2023, greenhouse horticulture was still responsible for approximately 21 per cent of Dutch industrial gas consumption, and the transition away from natural gas remains, as Wageningen University researchers note with some understatement, "an ambitious target." The sector is aiming to replace fossil gas with green hydrogen and renewable electricity. The infrastructure to do so at scale does not yet exist.
What this means for Mother's Day is that the environmental calculation for your bouquet depends enormously on where it was grown and how. Kenyan roses flown to London have a substantial carbon footprint from transport. Dutch roses driven to London have a comparable or larger footprint from production energy. British outdoor roses, grown in season and sold locally, have a fraction of either. The seasonal availability of British-grown flowers in May — when the question is not whether flowers are growing outdoors but which ones — is precisely the moment when the comparison is most favourable to domestic alternatives, and most unfavourable to imported ones. A bouquet of locally grown UK flowers in May produces, according to a life cycle analysis conducted by Flowers from the Farm, approximately 1.71 kilograms of CO2. The equivalent imported bouquet produces somewhere between 20 and 50 times that.
The Cold Chain: A Study in Refrigerated Excess
To understand the operational carbon footprint of a Mother's Day bouquet beyond the simple flight distance calculation, you need to understand the cold chain — the unbroken sequence of refrigerated environments that a cut flower must pass through from the moment it is harvested to the moment it reaches a consumer.
On a Colombian farm, a rose harvested at dawn is moved immediately to an on-site cold room, where its temperature is dropped to approximately two to four degrees Celsius to slow the ageing process and enter what the industry calls a dormant state. It is then loaded into a refrigerated truck — which produces approximately 15 per cent more CO2 than a standard vehicle — and driven to the airport nearest the farm, typically near Bogotá's El Dorado International Airport, which has been specifically developed to handle the country's enormous flower export volumes. On the busiest flower-shipping weeks of the year, including the weeks before Mother's Day, 30 to 35 fully loaded cargo planes fly from Bogotá to Miami every single day, each one burning jet fuel at a rate that most industries would consider extraordinary for the transport of a product with a seven-day shelf life.
At Miami International Airport — through which approximately 6.2 billion of the 7.1 billion stems entering the US each year pass — the flowers are unloaded and moved to refrigerated facilities for customs inspection and processing. They are then reloaded onto refrigerated trucks for the secondary journey to regional distribution centres, which may themselves be thousands of miles away: Miami to New York, Miami to Los Angeles, Miami to Chicago. Each of these journeys requires continuous refrigeration. Each adds fuel emissions to the stem's cumulative carbon account.
The refrigerant gases used in this cold chain add a further layer of climate impact that is rarely discussed. Many refrigerants are hydrofluorocarbons — synthetic greenhouse gases with a global warming potential hundreds or thousands of times greater than carbon dioxide. Leaks from refrigeration systems are common, and the regulatory frameworks governing these leaks in the developing world, particularly on farms and in informal distribution facilities, are weak. The refrigerant in a leaking unit on a Kenyan or Colombian flower farm may, over time, contribute more to climate damage than the fuel burned to fly the flowers to Europe.
In Europe, the cold chain continues. Flowers arriving at Schiphol or Heathrow are transported to the Aalsmeer auction complex in refrigerated vehicles, sold within hours in an automated bidding system that handles millions of stems per day, and then distributed again by refrigerated truck to wholesalers, regional distributors, supermarket distribution centres, and individual florists. Each of these links adds vehicle emissions. The refrigerated van delivering to the local florist is small but numerous — there are thousands of them operating across the country on any given delivery day. The carbon arithmetic accumulates at every handoff.
The Green Fog of the Dutch Hothouse
There is a layer of the environmental story that occurs before any transportation begins, and it is hidden in the fog of a Dutch greenhouse on a February night.
The Netherlands may not grow most of its own cut flowers, but Dutch greenhouses remain a major production centre for pot plants, bulb flowers, and specialist varieties destined for European markets. More importantly, the Dutch greenhouse model has been exported to flower-producing countries around the world, and its energy-intensive logic — the idea that you can grow any flower, anywhere, at any time of year, provided you are willing to consume the energy necessary to override the natural environment — has shaped the entire global industry's relationship with season and place.
The greenhouse, in this analysis, is not a neutral technology. It is an energy converter: it takes fossil fuel (in the Netherlands and in gas-heated growing operations elsewhere) or electricity (in LED-lit, climate-controlled operations around the world) and exchanges it for the ability to grow plants in conditions that would not otherwise support them. This is not inherently wrong — controlled environment agriculture has legitimate applications in food production, particularly in northern climates — but in the context of cut flowers, it is a technology deployed principally in service of cosmetic perfection and year-round consumer availability. The energy is not spent preventing famine; it is spent ensuring that you can buy a white chrysanthemum in December.
Dutch greenhouse operations have a long history of gas dependence, rooted in a deliberate government policy from the 1960s to promote natural gas as the primary energy source for the sector. By the late 1970s, the Netherlands had approximately 6,000 hectares of greenhouses, mostly powered by the Groningen gas field. Today, the country has approximately 11,000 hectares of greenhouses, and while the sector has made significant efficiency improvements — energy use per unit of output has fallen considerably — its absolute gas consumption remains very high. The commitment to fossil-free greenhouse cultivation by 2040 is real, but the pathway involves technologies, including green hydrogen and geothermal heat at scale, that are not yet commercially deployed at the level required.
For Mother's Day flowers, this matters in a specific way: many of the pot plants and specialty blooms sold in May — orchids, cyclamens, begonias, flowering house plants — are produced in Dutch or northern European greenhouses. These are often presented, implicitly, as a more sustainable alternative to imported cut flowers. In terms of food miles, they may have travelled less far. In terms of total energy consumption and carbon footprint, they may not be better at all.
What Happens When the Flowers Die
Mother's Day flowers last, on average, between five and ten days in a vase. Then they wilt, and they are thrown away. The environmental story of a cut flower does not end when it is purchased — it continues through the disposal, and what happens at that stage adds a further layer to the industry's ecological impact that receives almost no attention.
In principle, spent flowers are organic material and entirely compostable. A vase of dead roses, put into a garden compost heap or a municipal food waste collection, will decompose and return its nutrients to the soil. This is the benign version of the story. The reality is considerably messier.
Most consumers dispose of their dead flowers in general household waste. In the United Kingdom, where garden waste and food waste collections are patchy and inconsistent across local authorities, and where awareness of the compostability of cut stems is low, the majority of flowers end up in black bags, transported to landfill or incineration. In landfill, organic matter decomposes anaerobically — without oxygen — producing methane, a greenhouse gas approximately 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. The methane emissions from the decomposition of one billion-plus discarded Mother's Day bouquets are not trivial, and they are not included in most calculations of the flower industry's carbon footprint.
There is an additional complication. Many bouquets contain materials that are not compostable at all. Cellophane wrapping — the standard packaging material for commercial flower bouquets — is not biodegradable and is not accepted by most domestic or commercial composting operations. Synthetic ribbon, rubber bands, the plastic water capsules often attached to individual stems in mixed bouquets, the metal or plastic mechanics used in more elaborate arrangements — all of these go to landfill. And then there is floral foam.
Floral Foam: A Slow-Motion Plastic Catastrophe
Of all the environmental problems embedded in the flower industry, floral foam is among the most peculiar — a problem that has been hiding in plain sight in florists' shops and arrangement studios for seventy years, and that the industry has been extraordinarily slow to address.
Floral foam — commonly sold under the brand name Oasis — is a rigid, porous plastic material made from phenol-formaldehyde resin. It was invented in the 1950s as a by-product of another industrial process that happened to find a useful application in floristry: its honeycomb structure absorbs and holds water while supporting flower stems in a fixed position, making the creation of structured arrangements dramatically easier. By the 1980s, it had become standard practice in professional floristry around the world. Walk into a florist in any country and you will see the characteristic green blocks in regular use. Most elaborate arrangements — the kind purchased for Mother's Day at a premium florist or prepared for weddings, events, or funerals — are built on floral foam.
Floral foam is a single-use plastic. It cannot be recycled. It does not biodegrade. It breaks down, over time, into progressively smaller particles — which is to say, microplastics. A single block of floral foam contains plastic equivalent to approximately ten plastic carrier bags. When wet foam is washed, rinsed, or discarded, its particles enter water systems. Researchers at RMIT University in Australia tested a supposedly "biodegradable" version of floral foam, manufactured by the industry's dominant supplier, and found it had a similar chemical composition to standard foam and leached more toxic compounds into water than the original. Aquatic animals ate the material and were harmed by it. There is now evidence of floral foam microplastics in aquatic organisms across multiple ecosystems. The Sustainable Floristry Network has documented best practices for foam disposal and found that even under optimal conditions — straining the water from used foam through fabric before disposal — the microplastic particles remain in the environment indefinitely.
The foam also contains formaldehyde, classified as a probable human carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Florists who handle wet floral foam regularly — mixing it with water, inserting stems, disposing of used blocks — are exposed to formaldehyde leaching from the material. The Sustainable Floristry Network notes that microplastics from floral foam have been found not only in aquatic creatures but in human lungs. It is a material that is toxic to those who use it professionally, toxic to aquatic ecosystems when discarded, and persistent in the environment for an indefinitely long period. It is standard equipment in the industry.
Traditional floristry produces an estimated 100,000 tonnes of plastic waste in the United States each year — a figure that includes packaging, foam, and ancillary materials, and is now considered likely to have grown since the most recent comprehensive estimate was made. In the UK, the corresponding figure is not reliably quantified, but by any proportional calculation it runs into the tens of thousands of tonnes annually. Only 9 per cent of all plastic waste globally is recycled, according to the OECD. The light, flimsy nature of most floral packaging — the cellophane, the plastic sleeves, the thin wrapping — makes it particularly likely to escape landfill sites and travel into rivers, waterways, and ultimately the ocean.
The alternatives to floral foam exist, are well-tested, and are in use among the small but growing community of sustainable florists: chicken wire mesh, pin frogs (also called kenzans), natural moss, biodegradable substitutes made from coir and basalt wool. They require different skills and more preparation time. They cost more than foam. They produce arrangements that look slightly different from the maximally structured foam-built designs that professional floristry training has optimised for over several decades. The industry has been aware of the environmental problems with floral foam since at least the early 2000s, and has moved at a pace that reflects the balance between environmental concern and commercial inertia.
The Unsold Quarter
There is one more element of the waste story that the industry prefers not to discuss, and that is the vast quantity of flowers that are never sold at all.
A 2016 investigation into the structural economics of the US flower industry, conducted by Christina Stembel of sustainable florist Farmgirl Flowers, involved polling a significant number of commercial florists about their waste rates. Her estimate, based on those conversations, was that approximately 40 per cent of all flowers that enter the commercial supply chain in the United States are never sold before they wilt and are discarded. This figure has been disputed by industry representatives, but it is consistent with the incentive structure of a system built around peak demand: florists and distributors stock heavily for Mother's Day and Valentine's Day to ensure they do not run out at the critical moment, knowing that the cost of stocking too little is higher than the cost of disposing of excess. The flowers that are cut, flown, refrigerated, distributed, and never purchased — each one carrying its full carbon footprint from the farm to the bin — represent a colossal waste of resources at every stage of the supply chain.
In India, a different version of the flower disposal problem has attracted some creative attention. Approximately 8 million metric tonnes of flowers are discarded from temples into India's rivers and waterways every year. A social enterprise called PHOOL, based in Kanpur, hires manual scavengers — primarily women who survive by foraging through waste — to collect this floral waste and process it into incense, organic compost, and biodegradable packaging materials. The initiative diverts flowers from polluted waterways (the pesticide and fertiliser residues in discarded temple flowers are significant), provides dignified income to marginalised workers, and demonstrates that the end-of-life problem of cut flowers is one for which creative solutions exist. Organisations in the US are addressing the same question differently: non-profits including The Full Bloom, ReBloom, and Random Acts of Flowers collect flowers from weddings, events, and galas before they are discarded and redistribute them to hospitals, nursing homes, and shelters. These are admirable responses to a problem that would not exist at its current scale if the primary issue — the volume of flowers produced and distributed in excess of demand — were addressed at source.
Children Near the Greenhouses
The environmental impact of Mother's Day flower production is not only a climate story. It is also a story about what happens to the land, water, and ecosystems adjacent to the farms where the flowers grow — and to the communities of people who live there.
A group of US and Ecuadorian researchers, examining communities located close to floricultural greenhouses in Ecuador, found that in the weeks preceding International Mother's Day — the period when intensive pesticide application is at its peak, as growers push production to meet the holiday surge — children in those communities showed altered short-term brain activity consistent with neurological effects of pesticide exposure. The researchers concluded that the children had not been directly exposed in the greenhouses, but had been exposed indirectly through contaminated clothing, footwear, and tools brought home by floriculture workers — and possibly through pesticide-contaminated water downstream from the farms.
This finding is a specific and localised version of a wider pattern. The intensive chemical regimes of the flower industry disperse chemicals into the surrounding environment through multiple pathways: spray drift from open-sided or vented greenhouse operations, run-off into irrigation channels and rivers, volatilisation into the atmosphere, and accumulation in soils adjacent to the farms. In Kenya, Lake Naivasha — the ecological centrepiece of the country's main flower-growing region — has been dramatically degraded by decades of agricultural run-off from the surrounding greenhouse operations, with chemical residues accumulating in the lake's sediments and food chains. In Ecuador, the water conflicts between flower farms and indigenous farming communities in the high-altitude páramo have played out over years, with smallholder farmers consistently losing access to water that is disproportionately allocated to large commercial flower operations.
These are not abstract or distant harms. They are the specific environmental price of the cosmetic perfection that the flower industry delivers to supermarket shelves. They are paid by people who are not consulted about the terms, and who have no mechanism to refuse.
The Promise of the Ship: A Partial Solution
The most important structural change currently underway in the flower industry's environmental profile is the slow, contested, and technically demanding shift from air freight to sea freight — and it represents, more than any certification scheme or consumer pledge, the possibility of a genuinely transformative reduction in the industry's carbon footprint.
The obstacle to sea freight has always been time. Flowers are perishable. Cut roses under optimal conditions can survive seven to fourteen days before wilting. The sea voyage from Mombasa to Rotterdam takes approximately thirty days. Simple arithmetic suggests it cannot be done. What has changed is technology: specifically, the development of controlled atmosphere shipping containers that manage temperature, oxygen levels, and CO2 concentrations with sufficient precision to put flowers into a form of suspended animation, slowing their metabolism and effectively lengthening their viable life to accommodate the longer transit time.
Sian Flowers, a leading Kenyan producer, pioneered the commercial application of this technology in partnership with Maersk shipping, beginning sea freight shipments to the Netherlands in 2020. The controlled atmosphere containers maintain temperatures of approximately 0.5 degrees Celsius throughout the journey, reduce oxygen levels from 20 per cent to around 4 per cent, and increase CO2 from the ambient 0.4 per cent to approximately 4 per cent. Under these conditions, flowers arrive in Rotterdam with a vase life of approximately a week — adequate for commercial sale. The carbon saving is between 84 and 95 per cent compared to equivalent air freight: a near-total elimination of the transport emissions that dominate the industry's climate impact. Sian has reported spoilage rates of approximately 2 to 3 per cent on sea freight shipments — comparable to air freight rejection rates.
The Kenya Flower Council has set an ambitious target of shipping 50 per cent of Kenya's flower exports by sea by 2030. As of early 2024, sea freight accounted for approximately 4 to 5 per cent of Kenyan flower exports — a substantial increase from near-zero before the pandemic, but still far short of the target. The Red Sea crisis of 2024, which disrupted the primary shipping route through Jeddah and added weeks to transit times, temporarily set back sea freight progress, with one industry official noting that ocean movements "did not materialise this year." This is a reminder that sea freight is not merely a technical challenge but a geopolitical and logistical one, subject to disruptions that air routes largely avoid.
Colombian and Ecuadorian exporters have more experience with sea freight than their Kenyan counterparts: the shorter journey across the Atlantic means controlled atmosphere technology is less critical, and sea freight already accounts for a meaningful proportion of Latin American flower exports to the United States. Ocean freight is typically 40 to 50 per cent cheaper than air, meaning the economic incentives align with the environmental ones. The barrier is not primarily economic but logistical and habitual: the industry was built around air freight, its infrastructure is optimised for air freight, and the large auction houses and major retailers have supply chains designed around air freight timelines.
For Mother's Day — a May holiday — sea freight is, in principle, more viable than for Valentine's Day, because the pressure of extreme peak demand is slightly lower and the lead times longer. A grower who can schedule production to accommodate a 30-day transit has a feasible path to shipping by sea. Whether the industry develops the planning discipline, infrastructure, and retail partnerships to make this work at scale remains to be seen.
Certifications and Their Discontents
The flower industry offers consumers a range of certification marks intended to signal environmental and social responsibility: Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, Florverde Sustainable Flowers, and the US-based Veriflora standard, among others. These schemes have produced real improvements in specific operations, particularly in reducing pesticide use, improving worker access to protective equipment, and establishing some minimum standards for water management and waste disposal.
Florverde, the Colombian industry standard, reports that its certified members have reduced pesticide use by 38 per cent since 1998. The Rainforest Alliance requires that certified farms do not contribute to deforestation. Fairtrade certification guarantees a minimum price premium and requires adherence to labour standards. These are genuine achievements.
But as environmental certification instruments, they have a fundamental limitation that their proponents are reluctant to state clearly: none of them addresses the carbon cost of air freight. A flower farm can be impeccably managed — zero prohibited pesticides, certified water recycling, worker housing standards exceeded, biodiversity corridors maintained on the farm perimeter — and still put its product on a cargo plane and contribute the same per-stem carbon footprint as an uncertified operation next door. As Dr Michael Williams noted, "You can have an impeccably managed farm with excellent worker conditions and responsible water use, but if you're still flying flowers 4,000 miles, the carbon footprint remains enormous. Certification helps, but it doesn't solve the core problem."
There is a further problem. Most certifications focus on production practices in the country of origin, but the environmental impact of a cut flower is distributed across production, transport, packaging, retail, and disposal — and the certification schemes cover only the first of these. The plastic packaging applied at the supermarket distribution centre is not the certified farm's responsibility. The floral foam used by the florist is not the certification scheme's concern. The methane released by flowers decomposing in landfill is not included in any carbon accounting that consumers receive at the point of purchase.
Country of origin is not disclosed on most flower packaging in the UK, US, or EU. Consumers buying Mother's Day flowers typically cannot determine where the flowers were grown, what chemicals were used in their production, or how they were transported. The certification mark, where present, provides some information on a narrow set of farm-level practices. The full picture is opaque by design.
What Growing Season Actually Means in May
There is something quietly radical about the idea of buying seasonal flowers in May, and it is worth dwelling on it, because it represents the clearest divergence between the economics of the industry and the environmental logic of the situation.
May is, in most of the northern hemisphere, one of the best months for flowers. In the United Kingdom, tulips, daffodils, and narcissi are winding down, but peonies are coming into their brief, spectacular season. Alliums are flowering in shades of purple and white. Lilac, may blossom, cow parsley, and wisteria are at their peaks. Garden ranunculus, sweet william, and early sweet peas are available from growers who plant for the domestic market. Dahlias are not yet in flower — their season runs from summer into autumn — but there is an abundance of material that is genuinely, seasonally British, grown in fields and cutting gardens with minimal inputs, and available from specialist growers at comparable prices to imported equivalents.
None of these flowers will look like the flowers in a supermarket bouquet. They will not have the long, uniform stems of a Kenyan rose engineered for export. They may have imperfect petals, variable sizes, and the idiosyncratic beauty of things grown in the open air and shaped by actual weather. They will last less long in a vase than a flower treated with preservatives at every stage of a commercial cold chain. And they will have a carbon footprint somewhere between one-tenth and one-fiftieth of an equivalent imported bouquet.
The Flowers from the Farm cooperative in the UK networks approximately 700 small-scale British flower growers, many of them producing for local sales through farm shops, farmers' markets, and direct-to-consumer weekly subscriptions. The Slow Flowers movement in the United States performs a similar function, connecting consumers with domestic and local producers. These networks are growing, and the pandemic created a demonstrable surge in demand for locally grown flowers — as consumers, already asking questions about the provenance of their food, began asking the same questions about the flowers on their kitchen tables. Debra Prinzing, a founder of the US Slow Flowers movement, noted that most flower farmers she interviewed in 2020 and 2021 were selling every stem they could harvest. The demand is there; the infrastructure to connect it with growers at scale is still developing.
The Numbers You Are Not Shown
When you buy a Mother's Day bouquet at a supermarket, the label tells you the price, and sometimes the variety. It does not tell you:
The country of origin of the flowers. The chemicals applied during production. The carbon footprint of the freight used to transport them. Whether they were grown under certified labour and environmental standards. Whether the packaging is recyclable. Whether the arrangement includes floral foam, and if so, what you should do with it after the flowers die.
None of this information is required by law in most jurisdictions. The EU has introduced country of origin labelling for some categories of produce, but flowers remain largely exempt from the requirements that apply to food. In the UK, post-Brexit regulatory divergence from EU food labelling standards has not produced stronger requirements on flowers. In the United States, cut flowers are not covered by country of origin labelling requirements. A shopper who wanted to make an informed environmental decision about their Mother's Day purchase would, in most circumstances, be unable to obtain the information required to do so from the point of sale.
This opacity is not accidental. The flower industry has lobbied consistently against disclosure requirements, arguing that the supply chain complexity of a global flower trade makes meaningful disclosure impractical. This argument is worth examining. Coffee, cocoa, fish, and clothing all have comparably complex global supply chains, and all are subject to increasing disclosure requirements regarding origin, environmental impact, and labour standards. The flower industry's exceptionalism in this regard reflects not the genuine impracticality of disclosure but the industry's preference for consumer ignorance.
What a Sustainable Mother's Day Might Look Like
The gap between the current state of the flower industry and a genuinely sustainable version of it is large, and the reforms required are structural rather than consumer-level. But some of them are real and achievable.
At policy level: applying the same country of origin labelling requirements to cut flowers that currently apply to fresh produce would cost nothing and give consumers the information they need to make choices. Extending pesticide residue regulations to cover imported cut flowers, as they cover imported food, would close a regulatory loophole that has been open for decades. Carbon disclosure requirements for imports — already being developed for goods including steel, cement, and fertilisers under the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism — could be extended to flowers, creating a price signal that reflects the actual climate cost of air-freighted blooms. Binding due diligence requirements on retailers sourcing flowers from overseas supply chains would shift accountability from consumers to corporations.
At industry level: accelerating the transition from air to sea freight is the single most impactful change available, and the technology to make it work now exists and is being deployed at commercial scale. Eliminating floral foam from professional floristry — following the example of the growing community of foam-free florists who have demonstrated that beautiful arrangements can be made without it — would remove a chronic microplastic source from the supply chain. Investing in domestic growing infrastructure, particularly to meet the specific opportunity of May seasonality in northern hemisphere markets, would reduce import dependence for the world's second-largest flower holiday.
At consumer level: buying British-grown or domestically-grown flowers this May, through farm shops, Flowers from the Farm members, or farmers' markets, is the most direct available action. Choosing pot plants or flowering plants — which have no air freight component and a longer life — over cut flowers is another. Asking your florist whether their arrangements use floral foam, and requesting foam-free designs, sends a commercial signal to the industry. Composting spent flowers rather than binning them recovers some of the organic value from blooms that have already been grown and transported. Buying nothing — or substituting an experience, a donation, a home-grown plant, or a handmade gift — is always an option, and sometimes the most honest expression of the sentiment the flower was meant to convey.
The Particular Cruelty of the Seasonal Argument
There is a final observation worth making, because it cuts to something more uncomfortable than carbon accounting.
Mother's Day falls in May. In May, in Britain and most of northern Europe, in the American Northeast, in Canada, in Japan, and in most of the other wealthy countries where the holiday is most commercially significant, flowers are growing. The hedgerows are flowering. Gardens are blooming. If you wanted to give your mother a flower that expressed care for the world she lives in as well as affection for her personally, you could, in May more than almost any other time of year, find one within a short distance of where you live.
The industry has persuaded us — through the logic of year-round availability, cosmetic perfection, and convenience — that the flower she deserves is a Kenyan rose grown under chemical agriculture, treated with preservatives, chilled for thirty days in a refrigerated cargo plane, and wrapped in cellophane that will go to landfill within twenty minutes of arrival. That rose is real, and it is beautiful, and it carries genuine meaning. But it also carries a carbon footprint the size of a long car journey, a residue profile that would be illegal on food, and a supply chain that has externalised its true costs onto communities and ecosystems at the other end of the world.
The alternative is not a lesser gift. It is a different one. And it begins with knowing what you are buying, and where it came from, and what it cost — not at the till, but everywhere else.
