On the small, improbable revolution happening inside the world’s most sentimental industry — and what it might tell us about the things we’ve agreed not to say.
On a Wednesday morning in early May, in a converted railway arch in south-east London that smells of damp stone and green stems and something faintly medicinal that turns out to be eucalyptus, Rosie Doyle is doing what she does every morning at this hour: standing in front of the day’s delivery and deciding what it tells her.
The delivery has come from three farms. Two are in Kent, within an hour’s drive. The third is in the Wye Valley, on the Welsh border, and Doyle has been buying from it for six years, since before she opened her shop, when she was still working out of a market stall and learning, as she puts it, what flowers actually are when left to their own devices. The delivery contains sweet Williams, at their peak. Lilac — a bundle so fragrant that the arch smells of it before you reach the door. And anemones, in the deep burgundy variety that the big wholesalers rarely stock because the colour doesn’t photograph neutrally.
“The wholesalers want flowers that look good on a white background,” she says, holding an anemone up to the light from the arch’s opening. “I want flowers that look good in a room.”
This distinction — between what photographs and what lives, between the engineered ideal and the actual thing — is, in a modest but consistent way, what Doyle’s shop, called The Cutting Garden, is about. She has been open for four years. She does not use floral foam. She does not stock imported roses. She has, in the weeks approaching Mother’s Day, begun doing something else that has attracted a degree of quiet attention within the trade: she has restructured the shop’s entire visual vocabulary for the occasion, and written a note to her customer list that does not begin with the word “celebrate.”
The question of what Mother’s Day marketing says — and, more specifically, to whom it fails to say anything useful — is one that the floristry industry has been arriving at slowly, and from several directions at once.
The facts about the supply chain arrived first, or at least most legibly. Roughly eighty per cent of cut flowers sold in the United Kingdom and the United States are imported, most of them transported from Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, and Ethiopia by air freight, which is among the most carbon-intensive commercial transport modes in routine use. The dominant global rose — bred for uniformity of stem length, resistance to transit stress, and a shelf life calibrated to survive a week in refrigerated transit — arrives at the florist looking impeccable and smelling, as Doyle puts it with a mild precision, “of nothing in particular.” The social dimensions of the same supply chain are equally uncomfortable: the labour conditions at large-scale cut-flower farms in the global south have been subject to documented criticism for decades, concerning wages, pesticide exposure, and the working conditions of the women who make up the majority of the workforce.
None of this is obscure. It has been reported, at intervals, since at least the nineteen-eighties. It has simply not been, until recently, the kind of thing that the promotional materials of the people who profit from it have found occasion to mention.
“The industry trained people to not ask where things came from,” says Jonah Whitfield, who runs a small biodynamic flower farm called Fieldnotes outside Stroud, in the Cotswolds, and who has been selling to florists in Bristol and Bath for eight years. “Same as the food industry did, for a long time. Then people started asking.”
Whitfield is forty-one, bearded in the manner of someone who spends a lot of time outdoors and has stopped thinking about it, and he talks about flowers with the slightly evangelical precision of the recently converted — though he is quick to note that his conversion happened gradually, over years, rather than in any single moment. He grew up in Swindon, trained as a landscape architect, and ended up on the farm after a decade of designing public spaces in cities and finding himself, he says, increasingly interested in the parts of those spaces where something was actually growing.
“I came at it from the wrong direction,” he says, meaning that he learned what he wanted to grow before he learned how to grow it, which produced several years of expensive experimentation. “But I ended up in the right place.”
Whitfield does not use pesticides. He does not use floral foam — a position he describes not as an ethical stance but as a practical preference; he doesn’t like working with it, finds it imprecise, and considers the kenzan — the small, dense, pin-studded disc used in Japanese ikebana — a superior instrument in almost every application. He grows what the season offers him: hellebores through the winter months, narcissi in early spring, sweet peas and scabious and cornflowers through summer, dahlias into the autumn. He does not grow roses.
“People ask,” he says. “I explain. Most of them find it more interesting than a rose, once you tell them what they’re looking at.”
The movement that has formalised this approach goes by the name Slow Flowers — founded in 2013 by a Seattle-based writer and advocate named Debra Prinzing, who drew an explicit analogy to the Slow Food movement that Carlo Petrini had spent decades building in Italy. The logic, transposed to floriculture, was simple enough: that local, seasonal, and sustainably grown is not a concession of quality but a recovery of it. The Slow Flowers Society now lists nearly seven hundred member operations across North America, and a parallel ecosystem of similarly motivated growers and florists has taken root in the United Kingdom, Australia, and parts of northern Europe.
The membership is not uniform in its motivations. Some members are primarily driven by environmental concern. Others are more interested in the quality argument — the demonstrably longer vase life of the locally grown flower, the scent that the industrial variety has been bred out of, the specific character of a peony that has come from fifty miles away rather than from a cold room in the Netherlands. Some arrived at the movement through grief — through the experience of watching a parent or partner die slowly and finding, in the process, that the flowers brought to those rooms from overseas wholesalers had nothing to say about the occasion.
“I came to it through my mother’s death,” says Niamh Carroll, who runs a small studio called Briar & Bloom in Cork, in the south-west of Ireland, and who has been working exclusively with Irish and west-coast British growers for three years. “She died in March, and when I was arranging the flowers for the funeral, I realised I didn’t know where anything had come from. It seemed wrong. She had spent her whole life knowing where things came from — her food, her wool, her herbs. And here I was, putting flowers she’d never seen on her coffin.”
Carroll is thirty-seven. She worked in hospitality before she trained as a florist, and she talks about flowers with the specificity of someone accustomed to thinking about the provenance and preparation of things that are consumed and felt rather than merely looked at. Her studio does most of its work in events and weddings, with a smaller retail component. In the weeks before Mother’s Day — which in Ireland falls on the same date as the British Mothering Sunday, in March — she has begun offering what she calls a “memory arrangement”: a smaller, quieter bouquet, available without explanation, intended for the people who are marking the day rather than celebrating it.
“I had a woman come in last year who had lost her mother the previous October,” Carroll says. “She wanted something to put on the grave. Everything in the shop was pink and yellow and enormous. She said she felt like she’d walked into a party she hadn’t been invited to.” Carroll pauses. “That’s when I realised we had a problem.”
The problem Carroll identified — the gap between the customer the floristry industry imagines and the customers who actually walk through the door — is, at its most straightforward, a demographic problem. One in six couples will, at some point, experience difficulty conceiving. Miscarriage affects approximately one in four recognised pregnancies. Grief does not resolve on the schedule that a promotional calendar assumes; bereavement researchers have documented the way that the second and third year after a loss are often harder than the first, as external support structures withdraw and the permanence of absence becomes undeniable rather than merely possible.
These are not small numbers. They describe, in aggregate, a substantial portion of any florist’s customer base — people for whom the promotional apparatus of Mother’s Day, with its subject lines reading “she deserves the best” and its imagery of mothers and children in sunlit domestic interiors, arrives as something between an irrelevance and an accidental small injury.
The most visible attempt to address this arrived in March of 2019, from a London-based online florist called Bloom & Wild. A copywriter at the company — she goes by Lucy in subsequent accounts, and the deliberate vagueness about her surname has the quality of the modest professional declining credit she is owed — wrote four sentences to the company’s entire customer list. The sentences acknowledged that Mother’s Day could be difficult for some recipients. They offered the option of receiving no further Mother’s Day communications. They asked no questions.
Almost eighteen thousand people took the option. And then they wrote back. Letters came from the bereaved, from women in the middle of fertility treatment, from people whose relationships with their mothers were complicated by harm or estrangement or a silence so established that it had become its own kind of presence. The recurring phrase, threaded through hundreds of letters from people who had never written to the company before, was some version of the same thing: thank you for noticing us.
“I had no idea so many people would find it so touching,” Lucy told a reporter afterward.
The commercial response confounded the expectation that sensitivity costs revenue. Social media engagement quadrupled on launch day. The goodwill generated — the loyalty, the word-of-mouth, the press coverage in publications that had never previously had occasion to write about flower delivery — was worth considerably more than eighteen thousand names removed from a mailing list. Aron Gelbard, Bloom & Wild’s co-founder and chief executive, described the intention in terms that sound, on reflection, like the simplest possible formulation of what a customer-first business is: “Mother’s Day is really important to us and to many of our customers, but also a sensitive time for many. Offering our customers the ability to opt out allowed us to make the time of year that little bit easier for some.”
Bloom & Wild formalised the approach the following year into what it called the Thoughtful Marketing Movement — an open invitation to other brands to commit to opt-out mechanisms for emotionally charged seasonal communications. More than a hundred companies joined. By 2021, the opt-out had been extended to the entire website experience: customers who chose not to see Mother’s Day content would find no mention of it anywhere on the platform when they were logged in. The idea spread, with the slightly improbable momentum of things that turn out to have been waiting to be invented, to Australia and Singapore and Hong Kong. A Conservative Member of Parliament named Matt Warman, orphaned at twenty-seven, raised it in the House of Commons.
What Bloom & Wild had done was to name, in operational terms, a feeling that florists had been living with for years without being sure how to act on it. Carroll, in Cork, recognised it immediately. So did Doyle, in south-east London. So did Priya Mehta, who runs a studio called Stem & Story in Edinburgh and who had, independently, arrived at something similar.
“We started getting notes in our order forms,” Mehta says. “In the ‘special instructions’ box. People writing things like: ‘This is for my mum’s grave’ or ‘I’ve had a hard year, please don’t include a Mother’s Day card.’ And I thought: if this many people are writing this in the special instructions box, how many more just didn’t say anything and found the experience unpleasant?”
Mehta is thirty-four. She studied botany before she trained as a florist, which has given her a relationship to flowers that is less sentimental and more precise than many of her peers, and also a particular interest in the question of what flowers are communicating at a biological level — why they evolved to be beautiful, what they are advertising to the insects that pollinate them, and what it means that human beings have spent sixty thousand years, or something close to it, appropriating that advertisement for their own emotional purposes.
“Flowers are manipulation,” she says, cheerfully. “They evolved to manipulate insects. We evolved to be manipulated by them, because the same visual and olfactory triggers that attract pollinators trigger something in us too. And then we layered all this meaning on top — love, grief, congratulation, apology — and it stuck, because the flower is such a good carrier.” She pauses. “The question is whether we’re using that carrier thoughtfully or not.”
Mehta introduced an opt-out mechanism on her website two years ago, before she had heard of Bloom & Wild’s campaign. She arrived at it through the same logic: she knew that people were having difficult experiences with her Mother’s Day communications and she wanted to give them a way to say so without having to explain themselves. The uptake was smaller than Bloom & Wild’s — hers is a smaller operation — but the letters that came back were, she says, similar in character.
“One woman wrote to say she had been a customer for three years and had never felt able to write before, but she wanted to tell me that she had lost a pregnancy two Mays ago and that every time Mother’s Day came around, the emails from florists were the worst part of the week. She said ours was the first to give her a door out.” Mehta is quiet for a moment. “That’s not a sophisticated marketing insight. That’s just basic human attention.”
Basic human attention is, it turns out, not evenly distributed across the industry. The florists who have it — who have developed, through long practice or personal experience or simply a willingness to pay attention to what their customers are actually telling them — tend to share certain other characteristics. They tend to be small and independent. They tend to source carefully. They tend to think about the material conditions of their work with an honesty that the industrialised end of the business prefers not to apply.
This brings us to floral foam, which is the subject that tends to make thoughtful florists sigh in a particular way, as if arriving at a conversation they have been having for years and have not yet finished.
Floral foam is a dense green block, manufactured from phenol-formaldehyde — a plastic — that has been used to hold stems in position since its commercial introduction in 1954. It was invented by Vernon Smithers and sold to a company called Smithers-Oasis, which built a global enterprise on it. For nearly seventy years, it has been the invisible infrastructure of professional floristry: the reason arrangements hold their shape, the reason a stem can be positioned at a precise angle and held there, the reason the elaborate centrepieces at weddings and the sculpted displays in hotel lobbies maintain their geometry through an evening’s worth of ambient heat.
The florists who work with it daily — cutting it, soaking it, pressing stems into it, washing the residue off their hands at the end of a shift — have done so, mostly, without thinking hard about what it is. It is simply there, the way the bucket is there and the secateurs are there: part of the invisible equipment of the job.
A study published in 2019 by researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne interrupted this comfortable arrangement. The researchers found that floral foam, as it breaks down — which it inevitably does, having no biological or chemical mechanism for doing anything else — releases microplastics into the surrounding environment. A single standard block contains plastic equivalent to approximately ten carrier bags. The microplastics enter waterways, are ingested by aquatic invertebrates, and leach chemicals that the researchers found to be more toxic to those invertebrates than the leachate from most other plastic materials tested. The florists who handle the material daily are exposed, as a routine occupational matter, to formaldehyde, barium sulphates, and carbon black — compounds that occupational health research has long identified as hazardous.
“When I found out, I felt genuinely bad,” says Doyle, in her railway arch in south-east London. “I had been putting this stuff down the drain for years. I had been breathing it in. I had been putting it in my recycling, which — I now know — was worse than the bin, because the recycling processing centre just sends it to landfill anyway with a note saying it’s contaminated.” She has eliminated it entirely. She uses kenzans and chicken wire and, in larger arrangements, a technique she developed herself involving moss-packed wire frames that she will, if asked, explain at some length and with evident satisfaction. “It took me about six months to get comfortable with it. Now I prefer it. You have to think harder about the structure, but the thinking makes you better.”
The Royal Horticultural Society banned floral foam from its competitive shows in 2023, including the Chelsea Flower Show — which sets aesthetic precedents that ripple through professional floristry in the way that the runway in Paris sets precedents that eventually reach the high street, at some distance and with some distortion, but perceptibly. Plastic-free alternatives are entering the market; among them a product called Sideau, manufactured without plastic components, which is being adopted by studios willing to undertake the relearning the transition requires.
Whitfield, in the Cotswolds, has never used it. “The kenzan was the first tool I learned,” he says. “I didn’t know there was an alternative.” When told about the RMIT study, he nods in the way of someone receiving confirmation of something they had already assumed. “It’s a plastic,” he says. “What did people think was going to happen?”
There is, threading through the sourcing conversation and the grief conversation and the floral foam conversation, a single common element that it takes a while to name: the willingness to know things that are uncomfortable to know, and to act on what you know.
Mehta, in Edinburgh, puts this most directly. “The industry runs on a kind of cultivated not-knowing,” she says. “Not-knowing where the flowers came from, not-knowing what the foam does, not-knowing who is on the other end of the promotional email and what they’re going through. It’s not malicious. It’s just — easier. You close the knowledge gap and you can get on with the job.”
The florists who have opened the knowledge gap — who have started asking where things come from, what they cost, who is receiving what they send — have, in general, found the experience more commercially useful than they expected. Doyle’s shop, which opened four years ago without a social media strategy and with a sourcing policy that she describes as “expensive and complicated to explain,” now has a waiting list for its Mother’s Day arrangements. Carroll, in Cork, reports that the memory arrangement she began offering last year sold out within the first week. Mehta’s average transaction value has increased every year since she introduced the opt-out and the provenance labelling simultaneously.
None of them is entirely certain how to account for this. The most persuasive explanation may be the simplest: that customers who feel genuinely seen by a business — who find that its stated values correspond to something they actually observe in its practice — become a different kind of customer than the one acquired through a promotional email. They come back. They bring people. They tell the story.
“I had a woman come in last month who said her friend had told her about us,” Carroll says. “She said: ‘She told me you’re the florist who gets it.’ And I thought — gets what? And then I thought: gets that not everyone is celebrating. Gets that the person standing at the counter might be having a hard time. Gets that flowers are for more than the good days.” She pauses. “That’s what I want to be known for. I can live with that.”
The history of Mother’s Day is, in some sense, the history of what happens when a private feeling is handed to an industry.
Anna Jarvis — the woman who campaigned for years after her mother’s death in 1905 for a national day of maternal recognition, and who succeeded in 1914 when President Wilson signed the proclamation — spent the last thirty years of her life attempting to undo what she had done. The commercial capture of the holiday was immediate and comprehensive. By the early nineteen-twenties, florists were marking carnations up by forty and fifty percent. Greeting card companies were printing millions of units. Jarvis protested outside flower shops, filed lawsuits, attempted to shut down a carnation sale and was arrested for the trouble. She spent the last decades of her life campaigning against a holiday she had made, and died in 1948, in a sanitarium in Pennsylvania, without money.
The legend — unverified, but too symmetrically dark to entirely disbelieve — is that some of her medical bills were paid by the floral and greeting card industries she had devoted those decades to fighting.
Jarvis was not, by most accounts, an easy person. She was litigious, uncompromising, and incapable of the accommodation that might have allowed her to influence, rather than simply oppose, the commercial machinery that had annexed her holiday. But she had identified something real. The substitution of the purchased gesture for the genuine one — the industrial carnation for the handwritten letter, the transaction for the attention — was, she understood, a kind of loss. A loss not of money or of principle but of the quality of presence that the gesture had been designed to communicate.
The florists who are doing the most considered work today are engaged, from within the commercial event, in an attempt to recover something of what was lost — not by abolishing the holiday’s commercial character, which is not available as an option, but by ensuring that the commerce is in the service of something real rather than a replacement for it. Doyle, stocking anemones in colours that don’t photograph neutrally. Carroll, offering memory arrangements without explanation. Mehta, writing four sentences in an email and waiting to hear back from the people who needed to say: I am here, and I am not celebrating.
On a Friday afternoon in late April, in the railway arch in south-east London, Rosie Doyle is preparing for the following week’s orders. The lilac has been placed in deep water to condition. The sweet Williams are in cold storage. The anemones — the deep burgundy ones, the ones that look like something a Dutch painter would have placed at the edge of a composition to establish what darkness was — are on the worktable, waiting.
She is writing the card that will accompany every Mother’s Day order her shop fulfils next week. It is, she says, a new card this year. She wrote several versions before arriving at the one she will use.
It reads, in its entirety: For whoever you’re thinking of this weekend — with love.
No assumptions. No instructions about what the weekend should feel like. No carnation-coloured optimism about who is standing on the other side of the delivery. Just: for whoever you’re thinking of.
“It took me a while,” she says, setting the proof down on the worktable. “You want to say the right thing. And then you realise the right thing is to say as little as possible, and make sure what you do say leaves room for everyone.”
She picks up an anemone and places it, stem first, into a kenzan submerged in a shallow ceramic dish. It holds.
“Flowers are good at room,” she says. “They’ve always been good at room. We just haven’t always let them be.”