It's said that when you buy flowers, you buy emotion. Unfortunately, you don't necessarily buy quality or ethically produced plants or flowers. The caring sentiment behind the gesture of sending flowers is not always shared by global members of the flower industry. Flowers are certainly not meant to promote exploitative practices that were rife two hundred years ago in the industrial era. Yet in some areas of the supply chain, poor practices persist, as has been publicly revealed in recent years.
The Fair Flowers Fair Plants (FFP) Organisation is an international alliance of trade unions, non governmental organisations and international flower trade organisations that have all reached an agreement on the standards and procedures to create a decent and healthy industry that better symbolises the flowers they are selling and their aspirations for an ethical flower industry.
Arena Flowers are the first UK florist to sell FFP accredited products. They state that their buying team always aims to buy flowers with the FFP label when possible.
Being a very new standard, not all their products are currently available under the FFP banner. You can recognise FFP products on their site as they have the FFP logo on the product image.
You can find out more about the FFP initiative and purchase FFP flowers available from Arena, by visiting Arena Flowers or clicking here.
A company that seems to be taking things even further is Wiggly Wigglers Flowers. Dissappointed that many flowers sent in the UK are bought in bulk from suppliers in Holland; who in turn have their stock grown in fields as far away as Kenya, they have decided to grow and sell their own!
All Wiggly Bouquets are hand made on their own premises at Lower Blakemere Farm. They grow many of the flowers used in their own cutting patch, hand picking them fresh every day. So, instead of the stifling uniformity of a traditional bouquet from one of the big suppliers they offer a hand-crafted creation: each one unique and filled with freshly picked blooms and foliage direct from the English countryside. You can expect to see the kinds of flowers and foliage that we all love: tulips, nigella, rose hips, berries, ivy, pussy willow, anemones, stocks, delphiniums, euphorbia, helenium, honesty, sweet peas, corn poppies, rosemary, sunflowers, dill and more. In fact, whatever is looking at its best on the day your particular bouquet is made!
Wiggly Bouquets are made to order and shipped within the day. They are supplied with instructions on how to keep them looking at their best for as long as possible but please realise that these are natural products: they have not been chemically treated to prevent leaf fall and so some components may not last as long as bouquets from mass-market suppliers. Dead flowers can be composted in your wormery without poisoning the worms.
Their bouquets are packaged in their own, specially designed, box — which even contains a reservoir of water. All bouquets are sent on a priority overnight delivery service which gets them to their destination before midday. For further information visit Wiggly Wigglers or click here.
