“A woman should wear fragrance wherever she expects to be kissed”-Coco Chanel
Laura Reynolds looks at some of the cheapest beauty products available
Okay, so the sun is out once a fortnight at a push, and along with the chicks there's that bizarrely territorial goose at the back of the Langwith music practice rooms, which has probably already bitten at least five people. And with the exception of a few leafy areas popping up against the odds, there aren’t really that many flowers. Especially not on Vanbrugh Paradise – possibly the most concrete-encrusted space of land known to mankind. So it’s understandable that you’d want to buy some instead.
But what are we actually saying when we ‘say it with flowers’? ‘Happy Birthday’? ‘Happy Anniversary’? ‘I’m so sorry I threw up on your shoes last night, please take me back’?
You could mean any one of the above. Hopefully not more than one, because you’re in trouble if your girlfriend or boyfriend spends their happy anniversary cleaning up your mess while you’re apocalyptically hung over. Anyway, the message behind giving someone flowers is probably a nice one – or at least a horribly apologetic one – but is that really all you’re saying?
UK consumers spend about £1.35 billion a year on importing cut flowers, so you can imagine that that’s a lot of flowers getting a lot of frequent flyer miles. Government figures in 2007 found that the average bunch of flowers is flown about 33,800 miles to get here. That’s a long way to go to end up in an empty wine bottle or a measuring jug. In fact, considering my own personal disagreement with planes – read: irrational fear that I refuse to grow out of – it’s probably true to say that the daffodils sitting on your window ledge have flown further than I ever intend to.
Having said that, there’s a definite grey area around where we ought to be buying our flowers from, or if we should be buying them at all. It might be easy to say that the best way to stop flowers from travelling so far is by buying them from Holland, for example, instead of from Kenya or from Zimbabwe. But the solution isn’t that simple. While Dutch flowers might not be travelling so many miles to get here, the hot-housing method they’re grown by has its own effect on the carbon footprint, while African flowers can be grown in natural environments.
Added to which, European flowers have the same problems with pesticides as countries elsewhere. A study at the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment found that workers in the Dutch flower industry were subjected to pesticide levels more than 60 times the concentration that’s actually safe.
What’s often suggested is that we should just buy all our flowers at home, from farmer’s markets where we can be sure that the plants are grown naturally and haven’t travelled a long way to get here. You can find details of your nearest local at here, or alternatively just head to the one in town off Parliament Street.
The downside to buying locally is that obviously you can’t get flowers when they’re out of season, but that’s a fairly minor issue, all things considered.
The bigger problem at hand is the fact that, while we celebrate a job well done in saving the environment, the flower farmers in Africa and South America have just lost out on a major part of their income. In 2006, it was estimated that 300, 000 Kenyans were reliant on the flower industry for their livelihood.
So when we ‘say it with flowers’, there’s an underlying message that’s far more complicated than the message we want to send. Yes, there’s a huge environmental cost to buying flowers from overseas. In terms of fighting global warming our money would be far better spent at home in the long run – but that doesn’t mean everyone will benefit from it if we stop buying each other foreign flowers. It’s a difficult issue, and there doesn’t seem to be any right way forward.
That said, no matter where you get your flowers from, you should probably make sure you’ve got something to put them in. My housemates appear to have learned this the hard way yesterday, and we now have a whole load of flowers growing in the garden, lovingly planted in the remains of a tea-pot. Wonders never cease.
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