How a quiet revolution in the flower trade is challenging our habit of buying roses in January — and what it means for the planet
It is a Tuesday morning in late November, and Sarah Corbett is turning away money. A customer has come into her Bristol flower shop, Wild & Rooted, asking for peonies — big, blowsy, romantic ones, the kind that bloom extravagantly across Instagram and fill wedding arches with a frothy, tumbling abundance. Corbett knows exactly where to get them. She could have them here by Thursday. But she won’t order them.
“Peonies in November,” she says, with a patient smile that suggests she has had this conversation many times before. “They’ll have come from Ecuador or Colombia, flown ten thousand kilometres, kept alive in refrigerated warehouses, and they’ll last about four days. I just can’t do it anymore.”
Corbett is part of a small but growing movement within the floristry industry — one that is, quietly and sometimes uncomfortably, attempting to do what the cut flower trade has resisted for decades: connect the flowers we buy with the season in which we’re actually living. These florists are asking their customers to think differently, to wait, to plan ahead, and sometimes to accept that the flower they want simply cannot be theirs right now. It is a message that runs against every instinct of the modern retail economy, and yet — remarkably, tentatively — some customers are listening.
The Hidden Cost of a Bunch of Flowers
The British love affair with cut flowers is vast and largely unexamined. The UK imports around 90 percent of the flowers it sells, the majority arriving from Kenya, the Netherlands, Colombia, and Ecuador. The Dutch auction at Aalsmeer — the largest flower auction in the world, a building so enormous it has its own internal road system — processes around 20 million flowers every single day, shipped in from every corner of the globe and redistributed outward again within hours. It is a miracle of logistics. It is also, environmentally speaking, a disaster.
The carbon footprint of the global flower trade is poorly understood but substantial. Cut flowers are among the most carbon-intensive products per kilogram that the average consumer will ever buy, largely because they are perishable, requiring refrigerated air freight rather than slower, cheaper sea shipping. A rose imported by air from Kenya generates around five times the carbon emissions of one grown in a heated Dutch greenhouse — itself no paragon of environmental virtue, given that the Netherlands’ vast horticultural sector is a significant consumer of natural gas.
There is also the question of pesticides. Flower-growing regions in Kenya and Colombia have faced persistent criticism from environmental and human rights organisations over chemical use, water consumption, and the treatment of workers — largely invisible concerns to someone buying a bouquet at a supermarket checkout.
None of this is new information. But for most of the industry’s history, it has been information that the trade preferred not to discuss, and that consumers preferred not to think about. Flowers are a gift, an expression of love, a small luxury. Who wants to be told that their £12 bunch of supermarket tulips came at a hidden cost?
The Advocates of Waiting
The florists trying to change this dynamic are, by necessity, unusually good at making waiting sound appealing.
James Cock runs a flower farm and shop in the Wye Valley, on the Welsh border, where he grows the majority of what he sells across a carefully managed annual cycle. His operation is as close to zero-import as a British florist can realistically get: in summer, his fields overflow with dahlias, sweet peas, cosmos, and scabiosa; in autumn, he harvests seed heads, grasses, and the last of the chrysanthemums; in winter, he works with dried flowers, foliage, and a small selection of British-grown bulb flowers. His website features what he calls a “Flower Calendar” — a month-by-month guide to what grows in the British Isles and when, designed so that customers planning weddings or events can build their vision around what will actually be in season.
“The single most effective thing I’ve done,” he says, “is get people to book eighteen months out. If a bride comes to me wanting a summer wedding with British flowers, we sit down together and talk about what June looks like, what July looks like, what the field might be producing. And they almost always fall in love with what’s available. The problem is when they come to me in March wanting those flowers for May. Then I’m in trouble.”
This forward-booking model is gaining traction among a specific type of customer — often those planning weddings, who are already accustomed to thinking far in advance and for whom environmental values are an increasing factor in decision-making. A 2023 survey by the sustainable wedding platform Green Union found that 68 percent of couples who identified as environmentally conscious said that seasonal and locally-grown flowers were a priority, up from 41 percent three years earlier.
But the approach is more complicated for everyday retail — the spontaneous bunch bought for a birthday, a thank-you, or no reason at all. This is where florists face their steepest challenge.
Reframing the Impulse Buy
Anna Scott runs a shop in Edinburgh called The Stem Room, which she opened in 2019 with an explicit commitment to sourcing seasonal and British-grown flowers wherever possible. She is honest about the commercial tension this creates. “Retail floristry lives and dies on availability,” she says. “If someone walks in on a Friday afternoon wanting something beautiful, you have to have something beautiful. You can’t say ‘come back in June.’”
Her solution has been to reframe what “beautiful” means. The shop’s window displays are changed weekly to showcase whatever is genuinely in season, presented in ways that make a virtue of its availability. In winter, this might mean architectural arrangements of dried honesty, bleached grasses, and muscari bulbs in glass vases — a palette that would have seemed sparse or half-finished under the old paradigm of plump, imported roses. Under Scott’s curation, it looks considered, deliberate, and — crucially — desirable.
“I’ve had customers come in, look at the winter display, and say ‘I didn’t know you could do that with dried flowers’ — meaning they didn’t know it could be this beautiful,” she says. “That’s the conversation I want to have. Not ‘I’m sorry, we don’t do roses in January.’ But ‘look at this extraordinary thing that January actually gives us.’”
Scott also offers what she calls a “Seasonal Subscription” — a monthly flower delivery in which customers receive a curated selection of whatever is growing locally, without specifying in advance what they want. It is, deliberately, the opposite of the on-demand model: a surrender of control in exchange for surprise. She now has over two hundred subscribers on a waiting list.
The ‘Pre-Order for Later’ Model
Several florists have taken the philosophy a step further, developing systems that allow customers to pre-order flowers for dates months in advance — guaranteeing availability of genuinely seasonal blooms while giving customers the planning horizon they need.
Bloom & Season, a florist with outlets in Manchester and Leeds, introduced a “Future Florals” booking system in 2022, under which customers can place orders for seasonal bouquets to be delivered on a specific future date. The system includes a seasonal availability guide, so that a customer ordering a gift for a birthday in April can choose from the flowers that will naturally be available in April — tulips, narcissi, ranunculus, the first cherry blossom branches — rather than reaching for a year-round default of imported carnations or roses.
Founder Miriam Khalil says the model took time to explain but has been enthusiastically adopted. “People get it very quickly once you show them the calendar. They see what’s coming and they’re excited. It becomes a bit like choosing a seasonal menu at a restaurant — you’re not disappointed that asparagus isn’t available in October, because you know what October has that’s wonderful.”
The comparison to food is one that several florists make unprompted, and it is revealing. The “farm to fork” movement transformed how a significant portion of consumers think about eating over the past two decades, making seasonal, local produce not merely an environmental virtue but an aspirational lifestyle choice. These florists are attempting something similar for cut flowers — a “field to vase” reimagining in which the provenance of a flower is part of its appeal rather than an irrelevant detail.
The Industry Pushback
Not everyone in the trade is convinced. The major wholesalers, supermarket buyers, and many established florists view the seasonal-only model with a mixture of scepticism and, occasionally, irritation. Their argument is practical: consumers expect consistency. If the British public woke up tomorrow to find that roses were unavailable between November and May, the result would not be a wholesome pivot to seasonal alternatives — it would simply be a collapse in sales.
“The environmental argument is real, but you can’t run a business on principle alone,” says one wholesaler, who asked not to be named. “Our customers want what they want when they want it. The minute you start saying no to people, they go somewhere else. They go online. They go to the supermarket. And then you’ve helped nobody — you’ve just made yourself poorer.”
There is a version of this argument that is straightforwardly self-interested. But there is also a version that deserves to be taken seriously. The cut flower trade employs hundreds of thousands of people in developing countries, many of whom depend on year-round demand to sustain their livelihoods. A rapid collapse in demand for imported flowers would not be environmentally neutral — the emissions from unsold flowers, abandoned farms, and disrupted supply chains would have their own footprint. The environmental calculus is not as simple as “local good, imported bad.”
Corbett, the Bristol florist, acknowledges this. “I’m not saying everyone in Kenya should stop growing flowers tomorrow. That would be catastrophic for the communities there. What I’m saying is that we in the West need to think harder about whether we need what we buy — and whether we can be more patient about when we buy it. Those are different questions.”
What Customers Say
Among those who have actively sought out seasonal florists, the response is often one of surprised delight — a sense that they had not known what they were missing. Laura Chen, a 34-year-old teacher from Bath, began using a seasonal florist after coming across Corbett’s shop by accident two years ago.
“I went in wanting something for my mother’s birthday in February, and I ended up with this incredible arrangement of hellebores, muscari, and dried poppy heads that I’d never seen anything like before,” she says. “It was so much more interesting than the usual bunch of pink roses. Now I plan ahead for anything important. I look at what’s coming into season and think about what would suit the occasion.”
This kind of conversion story — from impulse buyer to seasonal planner — is common among customers who engage with the movement. But it requires, first, an encounter with a florist willing to have the conversation. And those florists remain a small minority.
A Quiet Revolution, Slowly Blooming
The florists at the vanguard of this movement are under no illusions about the scale of the change they are asking for. The global cut flower industry is worth over £40 billion annually. British supermarkets sell billions of stems every year. The idea that consumer habits could shift substantially within a decade is, by any measure, optimistic.
And yet. The organic food movement once seemed impossibly niche. The shift away from fast fashion, though incomplete, has visibly altered how millions of younger consumers approach clothing. The “buy less, buy better” philosophy has migrated from the margins to the mainstream on question after question.
“I genuinely believe the next generation of flower buyers will think differently,” says James Cock, looking out across his dormant November fields, already planning what he will sow in spring. “Not because they’re told to, but because they’ve been shown something better. A dahlia that you watched someone grow in a field five miles away — that you ordered in February and waited all summer for — is a completely different object from a dahlia that arrived at Heathrow on a refrigerated plane last night. It has a story. It has a relationship. That means something.”
He pauses. “And it lasts longer, too.”