How British Grown Flowers Can Make A Wedding Sustainable

If you are getting married and have strong principles when it comes to the environment, you will probably want your wedding to reflect this. That means much of your planning will be concerned with making the event as sustainable as possible.

That may focus on many things, from recycling preloved outfits (including the wedding dress) to biodegradable confetti. But the flowers simply cannot be overlooked.

Back in the days when Brexit deals were being negotiated, many British florists were worried that they would face hefty cost increases through a tariff of up to eight per cent on flowers imported from the EU. In the event, the trade agreement avoided this, but it highlighted the fact that as a nation, we import most of our cut flowers.

If that hadn’t been the case, fears about import taxes wouldn’t have been such a concern. But that begs a question: tariffs or not, should we really source most of our flowers overseas when there are so many great British-grown options? And should we accept the much larger carbon footprint that comes with importing them?

It is an issue that has been known about for years. In 2018, a Lancaster University study found that the average imported bouquet had ten times the carbon footprint of one grown in Britain.

The research found it didn’t really matter if the flowers came from the EU or not. Blooms imported from Kenya would generate more transport emissions, but Dutch-grown flowers would use more artificial heat and light - much more so, the study found, than those on this side of the North Sea.

While that sort of knowledge confirms what so many suspect, deep down we all know that buying more local goods is better for the ecosystem than transporting them hundreds or even thousands of miles.

That can apply to lots of things at a wedding, but there could be few better ways of giving the day a dazzling array of colour, while being very green, than by using British flowers.