Embracing British-grown Flowers
As a little girl I can remember going to the train station with my Aunt, to collect boxes of flowers for the florist shop she worked at. They came mainly from Devon and Cornwall and would have a treasure trove of anemones, narcissi, violets, lily of the valley or cornflowers inside tied with black cotton and wrapped in crisp white tissue paper.
Fast forward a few decades and this year I have made the conscious decision to use more British-grown flowers in my wedding work. I thought it was going to be pretty simple but do you know what, I was surprised at just how hard it is to source British-grown flowers easily and without added costs.
We do have a couple of really good wholesalers of British-grown flowers such as Flowers by Clowance and B J Richards, both based in Cornwall. Smith and Munson have also expanded their offering from lilies and tulips, which they are famous for, to now include more perennial flowers. All offer excellent quality, a to-the-door delivery via courier and simple ordering via a weekly availability list and their websites. Some of the larger Dutch wholesalers are also offering British-grown flowers such as Florismart and my local branch of Flowervision in Nottingham.
For me, doing mainly wedding flowers now, I often need a mix of flowers which means that large quantities of one variety doesn’t always work for the brief, so I decided to look for local growers via the Flowers from the Farm website. There seemed to be a choice of growers in my area, but on further investigation I was disappointed to find that many don’t sell to florists. This is mainly because they are farmer florists so use their stock themselves or see local florists as direct competition. I also found that a good proportion don’t deliver and in a busy wedding season I simply don’t have the time to collect from multiple locations.
I have however found a local gem, a lady who grows the most amazing range of flowers, sells them for a reasonable price and who is more than happy if I give her a weeks' notice and a vague colour scheme to work to. I have had beautiful dahlias, cosmos, scabious, 'Crème Brulee' phlox and butterfly antirrhinums, all of the beautiful summer flowers that maybe don’t travel well. I can have mixed buckets in small and large or I can have 20 stems of dahlia, it has truly opened a new world for me and lifted my wedding work.
I do believe that turning to British grown flowers has definitely lifted my wedding work to another level. It definitely doesn’t have the ease of logistics that we are used to around Dutch wholesalers and it does require me to always have a Plan B in case of poor weather or crop failures. But it has ignited a little spark of creativity again, having to be a bit more flexible and never really knowing what I will get or how many stems.
Honestly, I’ve loved the challenge of it. My advice, see if you can find a local small scale grower and embrace the challenge like I have, you won't be disappointed and neither will your brides.
Viv Bradford trained in West Germany in the late 1980s before returning to the UK, where she has pursued many roles in the industry from running retail premises, teaching floristry, working in wholesale, business coaching florists and running an award-winning studio florist specialising in weddings. Viv also created and runs Facebook group The Floristry Geek for students and those new to the industry which concentrates on educational content.
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