Rebels with a Vase: Meet the Florists Taking on Big Flower

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This expectation isn’t problematic only for the environment. The massive purchasing power of supermarkets and megastores has skewed the cost of flowers ever downward, making it hard for independent floral shops to compete and giving customers a false sense of what flowers cost. And e-commerce options are confusing to consumers and frustrating for florists. Sites like 1-800-Flowers, for example, gather orders and then find florists to fulfill them, taking a hefty cut in the process. (Florists report receiving as little as 50 percent of what the consumer paid for the bouquet.) Operations such as Bloomex, self-proclaimed as “Canada’s Official Florist,” bypass floral shops altogether. Bloomex buys directly from farms or wholesalers and creates and delivers the arrangements in nine Canadian cities and metropolitan areas. Both these models have spawned complaint-ridden Reddit threads, customer reviews, and Better Business Bureau grievances. Many retail florists belong to wire services, such as Teleflora or Florists’ Transworld Delivery (FTD), with standardized arrangements and set “recipes.” A customer ordering Teleflora’s “Whimsical Wonders” bouquet, for instance, should receive the same design regardless of whether a florist in St. John’s or Vancouver fulfills it. This model has been around for decades and is the go-to for many retail shops, but it relies on florists having access to all flowers all the time. Or, rather, it relies on consumers who want all the flowers all the time—even, it seems, if our choices include blooms dyed lurid blue that are stiff, scentless, and a little soulless. We think of flowers as special—as a way to express our love, our congratulations, our sorrow—but are we really treating them as such? Three days before a wedding last July, I meet florist Natalia Solis to collect some of the flowers she’ll be using for bouquets and boutonnieres and to decorate the cathedral and reception venue. First step: convert her Prius from mom-mobile to flower delivery truck. Out go two car seats, in go half a dozen large white buckets. We visit two flower farms within thirty minutes of Solis’s suburban home in Victoria, British Columbia, where her orders—among them, red poppies and their globular seed pods topped with tiny crowns, fluttery white corncockles, and golden raspberries on the vine—are waiting in water-filled buckets. She chats with the growers, who take us on a quick stroll of the flower fields to highlight what’s new or almost ready for harvest. Solis has been a florist since 2018. Specializing in what’s known as sustainable floristry, she’s part of a growing movement that’s reimagining the industry, reclaiming the artistry of flowers away from treating them as cheap, highly standardized commodities arranged by rote. Early in her career, she used Instagram to connect with local farmers who grew specialty cut flowers, as they’re known in the biz—flowers such as dahlias, sweet peas, and poppies that typically don’t travel as well as the “big three” commercial crops: ramrod-straight roses, carnations, and chrysanthemums that are readily available through the wholesale chains most florists rely on. Solis opts for locally grown product—not only with hundreds of flower varieties but also grasses, foliage, even grains and small fruits—and considers the environmental costs in every step of a stem’s journey from field to vase. (Until recently, she designed only for weddings and events but will be opening her first retail flower shop with another florist this spring.) As much as possible, Solis prefers to source from small-scale farms on southern Vancouver Island that grow flowers and foliage in open fields and unheated greenhouses. There’s a growing number of these operations in Canada, and not just in favourable climates like coastal BC or Southern Ontario. A 2024 report by Open Food Network Canada—an e-commerce platform that links small farmers with customers—notes that the organization’s directory lists 294 self-identified cut-flower farmers across the country, but the actual total is much higher. Sarah Kistner, a flower farmer and Canadian regional director for the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers, says the number of growers across Canada has boomed in recent years, especially since the pandemic, with membership increasing fourfold since 2017. (While there’s no published research on what’s behind the trend, popular social media accounts and online how-to courses make flower farming seem easily attainable.) But most of these new growers specializing in seasonal flowers are too small for wholesalers to carry their ever-evolving product. Although flower pickup that morning with Solis took less than two hours, even for her, going directly to growers isn’t efficient. She places most of her orders online and has them delivered. Some services are trying to make it as easy for florists to source locally grown seasonal flowers as it is to order from wholesalers. In 2018, Jaimie Reeves and Carrie Fisher started Toronto’s Local Flower Collective, which in 2024 connected twenty-six Southern Ontario growers with seventy-six florists. From May to October, growers list their available products online and deliver orders to Reeves’s design studio in Toronto’s Stockyards neighbourhood, where member florists can access them. There are similar collectives, hubs, and co-ops across the country, including Edmonton’s Cooperative Flower Network, which launched in 2023. Sourcing field-grown flowers locally isn’t possible year round. Both Solis and Reeves estimate that they buy through local growers about 75 to 80 percent of the time. They’ve also expanded their repertoire using potted plants, which can be gifted or reused after events, and dried florals to help extend the season. They still purchase through more conventional channels when necessary, not only because of Canada’s shorter growing season but also because, at present, there isn’t enough volume. Large events often require hundreds of stems of a particular bloom—which is tough for local growers to provide. The rest of the time, they use flowers from larger Canadian commercial growers and, occasionally, from international markets. Reeves might use a sentimental imported rose requested by a client for the base of her designs, for instance, but then fill out the arrangement with local flowers and foliage. The imports are reliable and serve a purpose, but they can “lack a little magic,” says Reeves, and “they’re not going to be the star of the show.” Back at Solis’s studio, we unload the buckets and start readying the stems for design. Earlier in the week, Solis had prepared the vessels for the wedding’s thirty-three arrangements. A few dozen small bowls, vases, and shallow dishes are lined up in the work area—each fitted with a pillow of chicken wire, secured with a strip of waterproof florist’s tape. Chicken wire may seem a bit lowbrow for a luxury event, but for florists looking to use sustainable practices, it’s the current go-to alternative to floral foam, a commonly used material for holding stems in place. Chicken wire actually marks the revival of an old technique. A pre-1950s floral design book might feature chicken wire, matrices of twigs, or flower “frogs”—weighted disks with pins, hooks, or holes—as “mechanics,” or means for securing stems. But in the 1950s, brick-sized blocks of green floral foam entered the market, nudging these older armatures aside. Foam made it easy for florists to transport their creations between studio and venue without sloshing water. When saturated, the foam keeps stems in place and hydrated and gives weight to the vase. There’s no question that floral foam is convenient. But the most popular foam is a phenol-formaldehyde-based single-use plastic that is tossed after every use, from large conferences with dozens of tabletop bouquets to private homes where it’s been delivered in an arrangement. Although Smithers-Oasis, the primary manufacturer, professes that some of its foams “degrade by 75 percent in 1 year” in certain conditions, it’s flimsy language, since “degrades” simply means it will break down into smaller pieces. Those microplastics can end up in waterways every time a vase is drained. In 2017, Rita Feldmann, an Australian florist and founder of the Sustainable Floristry Network, started the Instagram account @nofloralfoam to highlight the downsides of floral foam. Since then, controversy has split the industry between advocates who are adamant that they couldn’t do their work without it and florists like Solis, Reeves, and Feldmann who no longer use it. Ditching foam is usually the first step for florists trying out sustainable practices, but it can be scary in an industry that often requires speed, volume, and consistency. Foam is fast and reliable—you know it’s going to hydrate and hold your flowers in place—and Solis fully understands the appeal. Just a few days before the wedding, she received a last-minute request for a floral swag to adorn a wheelchair after the mother of one of the grooms broke her ankle. Solis could have easily purchased a foam garland, essentially a link of foam sausages that she’d soak and poke full of flowers. Instead, she created a moss-filled chicken-wire tube, in which she added foliage and blooms fitted into reusable water tubes. “Honestly, I’d sleep better if I just used foam,” she says over a quick coffee before the ceremony. It’s meant as a joke—yes, foam makes things easier, but Solis, like others in her field, doesn’t buy into the idea that floristry needs to be done a certain way. With the swag base now made, she can use it over and over without any foam carnage. She’ll add it to her stash of reusable mechanics at her studio—larger chicken-wire cages, rebar structures, and other armatures she uses to fashion larger installations like arches and chuppahs. Hitomi Gilliam, a much-revered educator and floral designer who lives on Bowen Island, BC, entered the industry in the 1970s. She started as a grower of specialty fuchsias, then moved into retail and began participating in design competitions where foam was ubiquitous. Her shift away from foam started as an aesthetic choice; she preferred a more minimalistic style that spoke to her Japanese heritage. But as she started teaching sustainable floristry, she faced pressure from event sponsors to demonstrate ways to use their products, including foam. In 2022, she organized the FREESIA challenge—Florists Recognizing Environment & Eco Sustainable Ideas & Applications—which she and German designer Gregor Lersch self-funded to avoid being beholden to sponsors. The online event, like her other teachings, encouraged “unusual, unseen, and innovative techniques” and the “clever use of earth-friendly materials.” And participants delivered, dreaming up alternative mechanics such as whole oranges, loofah sponges, and “lawns” of sprouted lentils. Although using such quirky ways to secure flowers is not practical for florists pumping out standardized designs, Gilliam is excited to see more designers experimenting and loosening up. New florists are starting to question why things are done the way they are, she says. “They want something more vibrant,” she says, “not so old fashioned.” When Marika Whitehead, a wedding and event planner in Victoria, started out a decade ago, foam was pervasive. Now, none of the florists she works with use it. “I can’t handle feeling it anymore; it makes my skin crawl,” she says. She’s also learned a lot from florists like Solis about the benefits of using local flowers. “I didn’t know what flowers were in season at what time; my florists have educated me,” she says. This lack of awareness extends to her clients, as Solis and Reeves also attest. They’ve found that most people—even those who might otherwise call themselves environmentally aware—don’t give flowers the same scrutiny they would food or fashion. Sustainability is rarely the reason clients come to them; instead, they’re largely drawn by the designers’ aesthetics, so discussions about the seasonality of flowers or omitting floral foam often come as a surprise. Reeves, Solis, and Gilliam aren’t alone in their desire to shake up a staid industry. In 2013, Debra Prinzing, then a Washington state journalist, released a book, Slow Flowers, and a podcast by the same name; that, in turn, launched the Slow Flowers Society. Inspired by the Slow Food movement, Prinzing rallied farmers and florists to educate and promote sustainable floriculture and floristry. Today, the society has over 850 members, largely in the US. Similar advocacy and educational initiatives have sprouted in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. For consumers, the choice will almost always be fraught. Buying from a main-street shop, regardless of where they source their flowers, supports a local business, but it might have high costs—to people or the environment—elsewhere. In the world of flowers, everyone will have their own line. Solis suggests that the most important thing consumers can do is to ask where flowers are coming from. “Local,” of course, is open to interpretation. For Solis, it means Vancouver Island. For Deanna Balmer, owner of the Wild Pansy in Toronto, it’s within a 200-kilometre radius of her shop. But to another florist, local could mean Canadian grown. Canada has a domestic cut-flower industry, with mostly large commercial greenhouses in BC and Ontario. In 2023, Statistics Canada reported there were 1,523 greenhouses specializing in flowers and 201 field-grown cut-flower operations, although competition from international growers, among other factors, is making things increasingly tough. A 2023 industry report noted that Canada loses roughly nineteen greenhouses per year, about one every three weeks. Where there used to be dozens of commercial rose growers, today there is just one, by some accounts. While Canadian-grown stems tick the “local” box and support domestic economies, how sustainable they are becomes more complicated for consumers concerned with their carbon footprint. Canadian-grown blooms don’t usually have to be transported as far as imported flowers, but they require more energy inputs to heat the greenhouses and artificially extend the growing seasons. For her master’s degree in sustainability from Harvard University, Becky Feasby—grower-florist at Calgary’s Prairie Girl Flowers—studied the greenhouse gas emissions from four North American rose farms and one in Ecuador. She found that overall emissions were higher for North American operations, which use heated greenhouses. She stresses that she was looking only at carbon emissions, not water use, fertilizer or pesticide applications, or transportation from wholesalers to the marketplace. “Sustainability is just a beast of an umbrella,” she says, “under which it’s impossible to catch everything that matters.” Making more conscious flower purchases requires consumers to temper their expectations of flowers and florists. Price is one metric. As with most things, “cheap” often means a race to the bottom. “There should never be a rose that costs 99 cents, because it’s impossible to produce it for that,” says Feasby. Price savings are almost always borne elsewhere—lower wages and less rigorous growing standards around pesticide and fertilizer use, for instance. Constant abundance is equally unrealistic. Reeves recalls the pressure of having to keep her coolers full of flowers when she had a retail shop and had to fulfill orders with standardized designs dictated by online delivery networks. If the cooler wasn’t full, customers would assume that everything was old, despite the fact that there could be thousands of dollars’ worth of flowers which would be tossed if they went unsold. “People want to see so much of everything,” she says. Balmer sometimes sees the same attitude in her shop, but she’s bucking the expectation. She sells her own designs, not those dictated by a delivery network, and deliberately buys only enough flowers for the week. Her business model is to have little to nothing left by Sunday afternoon. When that happens, even if she’s queried by customers, she’s “had a perfect week; we sold all the flowers that we bought.” Reining in the desire for excess and a “more-is-better” ethos is something that Solis, Reeves, and Whitehead try to get across to their clients, especially for weddings, where things can quickly get out of hand. Whitehead encourages intentional design. “I don’t just throw decor and florals out there just because they look pretty and because we might even have a budget for it,” she says. Instead, she encourages a minimalistic approach, with fewer, more thoughtful, and well-designed arrangements. And both Solis and Reeves encourage clients to share their aesthetic preferences—a wildflower look, for instance—rather than getting fixated on specific designs and blooms or recreating something they’ve seen on Pinterest. Even though Solis has set high standards for herself when it comes to sustainable practices, discussions with clients and designers sometimes make her uncomfortable. “Flowers are a luxury,” she says, “and even the fact that we can have a conversation about sustainability is rather privileged.” She hates the thought of shaming people who might want to just buy an inexpensive bouquet for themselves or a loved one. “But the people who have the ability and the privilege to talk about it should,” she says. “And they should be doing better.” At the July wedding, one of the grooms walked down the aisle wearing a bronze-coloured taffeta cape complete with a train, repurposed—à la Scarlett O’Hara—from a luxe curtain. Other than the single white roses carried by the bridesmaids, most of the flowers and greenery were sourced from local growers. At the reception, table arrangements included garlands of cherry tomatoes, curled garlic scapes, and the occasional golden raspberry. Mushrooms in orange and gold hues were scattered across the tabletops. Later that night, when the party had shifted to the basement dance floor, Solis returned to the venue and started her takedown. With permission from the couple, she shifted some flowers into containers for the wedding guests and venue staff to take home. All of the others she put into compost bags, after separating the wire and other mechanics from the vases for cleaning and reuse. At times, she can’t help but muse on the futility of her work: she’s painstakingly kept the flowers alive for days, and now she’s throwing them in the green bin. But they were grown for this purpose, they were designed and cared for with respect, and they gave great joy. “Sometimes I think about talking to them,” she says. “Thank you for your service. You were beautiful.” The post Rebels with a Vase: Meet the Florists Taking on Big Flower first appeared on The Walrus.