When Juliet said of Romeo that ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’, she spoke a common truth. We identify and love flowers by and for their scent.
But you will struggle to find many scented flowers for sale in Britain. This is largely because in the 1950s, the UK’s home-grown flower business was flattened by the Dutch government. Huge investment in its domestic flower industry saw the first air-freighted blooms arrive in this country, followed by the ‘Flying Dutchman’ lorries in the 1980s. Today the average Briton spends £28 a year on flowers, up from £8 in 1984, yet 86 per cent of these are imported, most via the Netherlands from Ecuador, Kenya and Ethiopia. These flowers are bred to survive transport and are scent-free because the biological effort required to smell sweet shortens vase life.
Now a home-grown flower movement is fighting back. Next week at the Chelsea Flower Show, the first miniature UK flower farm will be installed in the Grand Pavilion by Flowers from the Farm, a network of more than 1,000 UK growers from Cornwall to the Isle of Skye. The question, though, is whether – in a world that’s seen UK food price inflation of 38.6 per cent in five years, fertilisers caught in the Strait of Hormuz and wild weather devastating harvests – the organisation’s quest for farmers to grow flowers instead of food is misplaced.
