Sustainability

Human, Social, Environmental

Flower Hamlet was born of a love of nature and humanity at a time when both are in crisis.

Inequality and exploitation of people and planet are rife. Our de-natured societies alienate us ever further from one another and from the species around us. The result is that we, in the first world, chase more mass-produced stuff that makes us less happy, all the while extracting resources and choking the environment we live in.

This cannot carry on. The cut flower industry needs drastic change, and that involves producers and consumers. We need to think about flowers as we increasingly do about food: valuing the seasonal, the fresh, the unusual and the locally grown, over the dismal lowest common denominator of carbon-heavy standardised mass imports. We must also consider the welfare of growers and their communities.

Close-up photo of a bee pollinating a sunflower in Belair Park, Dulwich, South London

We wish to be part of a serious alternative to these outmoded, dysfunctional ways of living and doing business.

At Flower Hamlet we grow as much as we can on our own small Dulwich plot, using no-dig methods. Beyond that we source from wonderful kindred suppliers we know in and around London. They are all affiliated with Flowers from the Farm, the association for artisan cut flower growers in the UK, whose members eschew pesticides, artificial heat and light and disruptive digging, and instead ‘care for their soil, enrich the land, create food for bees and butterflies and generate rich habitats for soil microbes, invertebrates and everything that depends on them.’

A £3 supermarket bouquet may be cheap but it can never be truly beautiful. Chances are, its often-unseasonal stems will have been imported from the Netherlands and, before that, from Africa or Central America (often from farms with appalling labour and human rights standards, using intensive methods that divert vast quantities of water and use toxic pesticides), clocking up insane amounts of air miles, with a correspondingly massive carbon footprint. According to a seminal 2018 Lancaster University study, an imported mixed bouquet produces ten times greater carbon emissions than its seasonally grown, British equivalent.

For packing, presentation and distribution we use no cellophane wrap, floral foam, or any other plastics, and we source materials that are reusable or compostable (or, at the very least, recyclable). We transport as sustainably as possible, mostly using our own pedal power. We will never pay anyone less than the real Living Wage (not the watered down government version).

In the main, you will reap the dividends in the form of truly diverse blooms (grown with care by well-remunerated artisans) whose uncommonly heady scent is the result of natural breeding and growth, instead of methods designed for profit maximisation, mass production, refrigeration and international shipping.