floral designer Ellie
Sustainability is a big part of our business and life style. We are by no means living perfectly but I am constantly learning and tweaking our lifestyle and business practices to become more sustainable or to create less of a negative impact. Below is our mission statement demonstrating what we are doing/working towards.
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Over the next year I will be creating seasonal work to illustrate the wealth of options available through out the changing season, keep a look out on our Instagram page.
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Our Sustainability oath:
Seasonal Blooms
Plastic
Soil
Seasonal means grown using low impact methods, in this country, within the parameters of the natural seasons. We aim to use entirely seasonal locally grown blooms in our work and during the colder months when flowers are low on the ground, we make the most of the varieties available, stack arrangements with a wealth of gorgeous British foliage, dried flowers, seed heads, lichen branches... dreamy! For our own projects and bouquet deliveries all our ingredients are seasonal. For our event work we will encourage you to choose seasonal locally grown alternatives.
Why choose seasonal blooms?
Like anything flowers can be mass produced in artificial environments created to encourage a much longer growing seasons and "perfect" blooms. This process uses chemicals, energy and takes a natural product and makes it unnatural. The Guardian in 2019 reported 86% of flowers purchased in the UK are imported, the stems you see in our supermarkets and from wholesale floral supply stockists travel from as far away as Ecuador, Kenya and Holland. Each flower's Co2 footprint is hugely increased in these methods and it becomes very negative to the environment. Imagine such a natural product being a detriment to the environment. The mind boggles.
Support locally grown flowers and still have a huge variation of species to bring us equal if not more flowery joy!
We do not use single use plastic in our work. Our flowers will never come wrapped in celeophane and we will never use floral foam which is a non biodegradable mirco-plastic. We use twine or paper tape in place of celotape and cable ties. If cable ties are used we will use reusable ones.
All our reusable plastics are well looked after and reused again and again. When we buy new we look for non plastic alternatives.
Non biodegradable balloons and confetti at weddings make us weep! We hope to offer petal confetti this year, but we are always happy to recommend other businesses with sustainability in mind.
We are constantly growing our knowledge on better more sustainable ways to grow our flowers, we use no dig methods which avoid breaking the soils surface as we now know this releases carbon into the atmosphere. Our flowers are grown with organic practices without pesticides or synthetic materials. We use growing methods that are kind to the soil and replenish what nutrients we take from it to grow our blooms. We use locally made peat free compost, manure from our neighbouring horses and straw from our neighbouring fields.
Waste
We do not waste stems, anything left over or extra is dried and used within our work or composted. We save dried stems for out of season (October - April) work- the only way we will give you roses in winter!
We live by the mantra reduce, reuse, recycle!
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