Opinion

Advertisement Supported by Guest Essay By Margaret Renkl Ms. Renkl is a

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Guest Essay

By Margaret Renkl

Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.

NASHVILLE — If you haven't yet ordered flowers for tomorrow, you’ve likely waited too long. Valentine's Day accounts for some 30 percent of annual cut-flower sales — more than the holiday season does, more than even Mother's Day — so it's very likely that all the florists in town are already booked. You’ll have better luck at your local grocery or big-box store, but you’re kidding yourself if you think this gesture won't be recognized for what it is. Nothing says "I forgot Valentine's Day" quite like a plastic-wrapped bouquet from a bucket by the checkout line at Target.

Just as well. The massive cut-flower industry — valued at $34 billion in 2019 — isn't the most environmentally criminal of all commercial enterprises, but it's far from benign.

As the Sustainable Floristry Network points out, cultivating unblemished flowers requires liberal applications of insecticides and herbicides, and many of those poisons enter the water system (not to mention the skin and lungs of agricultural workers). Imported flowers must be treated with fungicides, as well, to prevent foreign microbes from wreaking havoc on domestic agriculture. The floral foam commonly used in cut-flower arrangements is yet another contaminant, leaching toxic chemicals into the water supply and creating a significant source of microplastic pollution in waterways.

Then there's transportation. Most commodity flowers — including 80 percent of the cut flowers sold in the United States — are grown in the Global South and transported to customers in Europe and North America. But not by container ship, like the vast majority of imported commodities. Flowers are fragile and highly perishable and must be transferred via refrigerated jets and then by refrigerated trucks. Once at the florist or big-box store, they must be kept in actual refrigerators.

When he was a senior aviation researcher at the International Council on Clean Transportation, Brandon Graver did the math on the annual carbon cost of transporting Valentine's Day flowers from Colombia alone, concluding, "Flying that much sweet-smelling cargo burns 114 million liters of fuel and emits approximately 360,000 metric tons of CO₂." For comparison, he noted, "A forest larger than the area of Houston (1,624 square kilometers) would be needed to sequester that amount of carbon." If you add the carbon cost of the flowers’ protective packaging and of getting them to customers’ doors, you’d need a bigger forest still.

If all this is news to you, it may be engendering a certain amount of despair. Isn't there anything left that we’re allowed to view with unalloyed joy? If not a bouquet of bright flowers in the dead of February, then what?

Fortunately, there are many ways to say, "I love you" that don't also say, "Eh, I don't really care that much about the planet." I’m a big fan of love letters and walks in the moonlight, myself.

If you have your heart set on giving flowers — or flower-adjacent gifts — you could consider paper flowers. I have seen gorgeous handmade peonies online that I couldn't tell from the real thing. Or for the green-thumbed, a nice houseplant might work. The popularity of indoor plants exploded during Covid: 71 percent of North American greenhouses saw increased sales in 2020.

The environmental impact of the domestic houseplant market can be hard to parse, but it isn't benign, either, involving some of the same problems with pesticides, water use and transportation as cut flowers. But there's still a big difference between domestically grown houseplants and imported flowers, and not just in the relative carbon costs of transportation. Houseplants aren't discarded two days after Valentine's Day.

I have a ficus tree that I bought for my first college apartment. Over the 40 years since I brought it home, it has moved with me to Philadelphia; Columbia, S.C.; and four Nashville homes. When we added a screen porch that blocked the light to the only room the tree fit in, it went to live at a neighbor's house. Twenty years later, it came back to our house because our neighbors had adopted a pandemic puppy and needed a place to put his crate. Which was fine by us, because we’d turned the screen porch into a sunroom by then and had space for the ficus again. One of our sons rolled it down the street on a dolly, his head entirely obscured by the foliage. Birnam Wood to Dunsinane to Nashville.

Still, the very best environmental alternative to a bouquet of imported flowers probably isn't a potted plant or even paper flowers. The best alternative, I would argue, is a local flower farm, ideally one that operates according to regenerative farming principles. It's possible to support sustainable flowers through gift cards, retail sales at farmers’ markets or community-supported agriculture subscriptions. A flower C.S.A. works much like a produce C.S.A.: Customers provide the farmer with a reliable source of income, and the farmer provides a reliable source of fresh, in-season flowers (or, in winter, foliage and berry-laden boughs). Often the flowers are fragile heirloom varieties that would never survive a trip from South America.

I learned about flower farmers from "Slow Flowers: Four Seasons of Locally Grown Bouquets From the Garden, Meadow and Farm." This 2013 book by Debra Prinzing started an entire slow flower movement. She now has a website and a podcast aimed at helping people find sustainable alternatives to imported flowers for occasions big and small or just for the pleasure of having fresh flowers in the house. This concept, she writes, is an "artisanal, anti-mass-market approach to celebrations, festivities and floral gifts of love." Her site provides a searchable database of flower farms and florists committed to locally sourced flowers.

Sure, it's easier to grab a plastic-wrapped bouquet from the grocery store and check Valentine's Day off your list. It takes a little more thought and a little more planning to send flowers — or plants and paper flowers — another way. It might cost a little more, too. Think about it, though: If you really need to save money or time, it's a lot faster and a lot cheaper to write a heartfelt love letter and go for a walk in the moonlight. But if you want to give your beloved a botanical gift, why not make it a gift to the planet, too?

Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books "Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South" and "Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss."

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