On slowness, care, and the quiet revolution happening inside the world’s most sentimental industry
There is a particular quality of light in a flower farm at six in the morning. Before the heat settles. Before the day acquires its purpose and noise. The rows of stems catch the low angle of it and hold it differently depending on what they are — the ranunculus translucent at the edges, the sweet peas casting almost no shadow at all, the tulips absorbing the light entirely and returning nothing.
Laura Beth Resnick has been walking these rows for years. Her farm is in Baltimore — one acre, more than forty varieties, a cold room that runs the length of the back wall and smells of wet soil and green stems and something else, something harder to name, that might simply be aliveness. She is not a large operation. She does not sell to supermarkets or to the wholesale market. She sells almost exclusively to local florists who know her name and call ahead to ask what’s coming in.
She is thinking, this morning in late April, about what she can promise for Mother’s Day.
“Sweet peas,” she says, lifting a stem and turning it slowly. “Maybe the first peonies, if the weather holds. The ranunculus are at their best right now.” She pauses. “No roses. I can’t really grow roses here, so I don’t try.”
The statement lands softly, but it is not a small one. In an industry built on the promise of abundance — any flower, any colour, any time — the decision not to try to grow something you can’t grow well is its own kind of philosophy.
The flower you buy at a petrol station forecourt has almost certainly travelled further than you have this week. The majority of cut flowers sold in Britain and the United States — somewhere around 80 percent — are imported, most of them by air from Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, and Ethiopia. They have been grown at altitude, in vast glasshouses or open fields, by workers whose names and working conditions the consumer rarely knows. They have been cut, graded, refrigerated, packed, loaded onto a cargo plane, unloaded, refrigerated again, graded again, packed again, and driven in a refrigerated van to a distribution centre, and then to a wholesale market, and then to a shop.
By the time they reach the window of the florist, they have been travelling for somewhere between three and ten days. They will look perfect. They have been bred to look perfect. The variety of rose that dominates the global cut flower trade has been selected not for scent, not for the particular way it opens and drops its petals in stages over ten days, but for uniformity of stem length and petal density and resistance to the stresses of refrigerated transit.
We have, in other words, built a global system for delivering a certain kind of beautiful thing at a certain price. And it works, in its way. But it has a cost that the price does not reflect. The carbon of the flight. The pesticides in the soil. The water drawn from aquifers in regions where water is scarce. The worker in the Kenyan growing house who has not been told what the chemicals she applies to the stems might do to her lungs over time.
Most of the florists who are doing the most interesting work right now have thought carefully about this. Some of them thought about it slowly, over years. Some had a single moment — a conversation, an article, a visit to a farm — that changed how they understood the supply chain behind their craft. All of them arrived at roughly the same place: that the flower is only as beautiful as what it cost to make it, and that if you don’t know what it cost, you don’t fully know the flower.
Slowness is not a romantic idea in floristry. It is a logistical reality. The flower that is grown locally and in season and sold within days of cutting is not just ethically preferable to its imported equivalent — it is, in many cases, simply better. The ranunculus that Resnick harvested yesterday will last longer in the vase than a ranunculus that spent four days in a refrigerated hold. The peony that came from a farm forty miles away smells like a peony. The one that flew in from Ecuador may not.
Debra Prinzing understood this. The Seattle-based writer and advocate began the Slow Flowers movement in 2013, drawing a deliberate line from the Slow Food philosophy that Carlo Petrini had articulated in Italy decades earlier. The logic was the same: that local, seasonal, and sustainably produced is not a sacrifice. It is a return to what the thing actually is.
“Grown not flown.” Three words that contain an entire argument.
The Slow Flowers Society that Prinzing founded now lists nearly 700 member operations across North America — small farms, independent florists, studio designers who work exclusively with what is actually growing in their region at the time of year their customers need it. The directory launched just before Mother’s Day in 2014. It was not a coincidence. The holiday is the most pressurised moment in the floriculture calendar, the moment when the gap between what the market demands and what local growers can provide is widest and most uncomfortable to navigate.
But it is also, for that reason, the moment when the commitment to local sourcing is most meaningful. It is easy to be principled when the season is cooperative. It is harder in early May, when the tulips are fading and the peonies are only just beginning and the customer standing at the counter wants roses.
The florists who hold the line — who explain what is and isn’t available and why, who build arrangements around what is actually blooming, who trust their customers to find the seasonal constraint interesting rather than disappointing — are doing something that takes genuine conviction. They are also, as it turns out, doing something that works.
Amber Flack runs Little Acre Flowers in Washington DC. Her studio sources almost entirely from local farms. She talks about provenance the way that a good wine merchant might talk about a vineyard — not as a marketing exercise, but as the natural context for understanding what you’re looking at.
“The closer to the source, the less distance there is to travel,” she says. “That’s going to be a more sustainable option.” She pauses in the way that people pause when they’re saying something they have said many times but still believe. “But it’s also just going to be a better flower.”
There is, in the sustainable floristry conversation, a tendency to frame local sourcing primarily as a sacrifice — as the ethical choice that requires the consumer to accept less. Flack and Resnick and the wider Slow Flowers community would resist that framing. The seasonal arrangement, built around what is genuinely available, has a quality that the industrially produced bouquet — for all its engineered perfection — cannot replicate. It carries the specific character of a place and a time. It looks different from the arrangement in the supermarket. It smells different. It feels different in the hand.
This is not nostalgia. It is precision.
There is a flower called the forget-me-not. Its name is its entire function. It asks for nothing except to be received.
Some florists have begun stocking forget-me-nots prominently in the first two weeks of May. Not because there is a large and easily identifiable market for grief arrangements during Mother’s Day — there is not, in any conventional marketing sense — but because they have noticed something that the industry has been slow to acknowledge: that not everyone who walks through the door in the weeks before Mother’s Day is celebrating.
The bereaved. The person who has been trying to have a child for three years and has not yet succeeded. The person whose mother is still alive but with whom they have not spoken for reasons that are not simple and are not their fault. The person who lost a pregnancy last year and for whom the saturation of the cultural environment with celebration and pink carnations and cheerful subject lines in their inbox is not a gentle background hum but a specific and recurring pain.
These are not small categories. Grief of some kind touches most lives. The florist who acknowledges this — who places the forget-me-not in the window alongside the ranunculus, who trains their staff to ask “how can I help you?” rather than “what are you getting for your mum?” — is not making a political statement. They are simply noticing who is actually standing in front of them.
The history of Mother’s Day is, in some ways, the history of what happens when a private feeling becomes a public occasion and then a commercial one.
Anna Jarvis wanted to create a day for quiet acknowledgement. She had watched her own mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, spend decades organising women’s groups to address public health challenges in West Virginia — work that was largely invisible, unrewarded, and done without expectation of recognition. When her mother died in 1905, Anna began campaigning for a national day that would make that kind of work visible.
She succeeded, in 1914, when Woodrow Wilson signed the proclamation. She then spent the remaining thirty-four years of her life trying to undo what she had done.
By the 1920s, carnations were being marked up by 40 and 50 percent in the weeks before the holiday. Greeting card companies were printing millions of units. Candy manufacturers were packaging their products in white ribbon and calling it a Mother’s Day gift. Jarvis protested outside flower shops. She filed lawsuits. She was once arrested for attempting to shut down a carnation sale. She sent letters to editors, petitioned Congress, wrote pamphlets in the sharp, wounded voice of someone who has watched something they made carefully become something they no longer recognise.
She died in 1948, in a sanitarium in Pennsylvania, without money. The persistent legend — its accuracy unverified, its symbolic weight undeniable — is that some of her medical bills were paid by the floral and greeting card industries she had spent her final years fighting.
What Jarvis wanted is not, perhaps, as far from what the best contemporary florists want as the distance might suggest. She wanted the gesture to mean something. She wanted the feeling to precede and determine the form, rather than the other way around. She wanted the flower to be chosen, not purchased. She wanted attention, not transaction.
The florists who are doing the most considered work today are trying to restore something of this — not by abolishing the commercial holiday, which is their livelihood and which is not going anywhere, but by treating the commerce as the vehicle for something real rather than as the end in itself.
In 2019, a copywriter named Lucy was working at Bloom & Wild, a London-based online flower delivery company. It was March. The Mother’s Day promotional cycle was beginning. Lucy had been thinking about something she’d noticed the previous year — a pattern in the customer correspondence. People had written in asking to be removed from the Mother’s Day mailing list. Not because they were unhappy with the service. Because the emails were difficult for them to receive.
She wrote an email. Four sentences. It acknowledged that Mother’s Day might be hard for some people. It offered them the option to receive no further communications on the subject. It asked no questions.
She sent it on a Sunday morning.
Almost 18,000 people responded. And then they kept writing — letters that arrived in the company’s inbox over the days that followed, from people who had never written to Bloom & Wild before and would not write again, except that they needed, on this particular occasion, to say: thank you for noticing us.
“I had no idea,” Lucy said afterwards. “I had no idea so many people would find it so touching.”
The commercial result was not what the industry expected. Social media engagement quadrupled. The earned media — the coverage in publications that had never previously written about a flower delivery company — was considerable. The goodwill generated was not the kind that fades with the promotional season. It was the kind that stays, because it is built on the customer’s conviction that the brand has actually thought about them as a person.
Aron Gelbard, Bloom & Wild’s co-founder and chief executive, described the intention simply. “Mother’s Day is really important to us and to many of our customers, but also a sensitive time for many. Offering our customers the ability to opt out allowed us to make the time of year that little bit easier for some.”
That sentence contains more wisdom about marketing than most strategy decks. Its logic is so plain as to seem obvious. And yet nobody, before Lucy wrote that email, had acted on it.
The following year, Bloom & Wild built the idea into something larger — the Thoughtful Marketing Movement, an invitation to other brands to adopt similar opt-out policies for potentially distressing holiday communications. More than 100 companies joined. By 2021, the opt-out had expanded to the entire website experience: customers who opted out would find no mention of Mother’s Day anywhere on the platform when they were logged in. Not the homepage. Not the navigation. Not the product pages.
The idea spread. To Australia. To Singapore. To Hong Kong. A Conservative MP named Matt Warman raised the matter in the House of Commons, describing the dread with which bereaved people approach promotional seasons, calling for a voluntary code. What had begun as four sentences — written by one person, sent on a Sunday morning because she thought people were more likely to open their email then — had become, in three years, something that reached parliament.
There is a word that does not appear very often in the floristry trade press: grief. It appears in the marketing for sympathy arrangements, for funerals, for the quiet, functional end of the business. But in the context of Mother’s Day — the holiday most saturated with affect, the one that lands hardest on the people for whom it cannot be a celebration — it is largely absent.
The industry has preferred a different vocabulary. Celebrate. Spoil. She deserves it. The best for the best. Treat her.
These phrases are not wrong, exactly. They serve a real purpose for the significant portion of the customer base who does have a mother they love, who is alive and present, and for whom the second Sunday of May is genuinely a day of warm feeling and gratitude. For that customer, the pink carnation and the cheerful subject line are exactly right.
But they are not right for everyone. And the gap between the customer the industry imagines and the customers who are actually there — who bring their grief and their complicated histories and their complicated relationships through the door and stand at the counter and need something — is wider than the promotional calendar acknowledges.
Roughly one in six couples will experience difficulty conceiving at some point. Miscarriage affects approximately one in four pregnancies, making it the most common pregnancy complication in clinical terms and one of the least socially acknowledged in cultural ones. The weeks around Mother’s Day — saturated with imagery of mothers and children, with the assumption of biological continuity and domestic warmth — are among the hardest of the year for people navigating infertility, pregnancy loss, or the grief of a child who did not survive.
Bereavement, meanwhile, does not follow a timetable. The first Mother’s Day after a loss may be survivable on the strength of community support and shock. The third or fourth may be harder, as the support fades and the permanence of the absence becomes more fully real. A promotional email that arrives in the inbox of someone who lost their mother six years ago can land as a small violence — the same as one that arrives six months after the death. The holiday’s marketing assumes a linear resolution of grief that grief itself does not observe.
And beyond bereavement and fertility, there are the configurations that the industry’s visual language has simply never made room for. The same-sex couple where both partners are mothers. The transgender woman who is a mother. The grandmother who raised her grandchildren from the beginning, who is the central figure of the household, who has never once been the subject of a flower company’s advertising. The father who raised his children alone. The aunt who stepped in. The older sibling who became, for all practical purposes, the parent.
None of these people are invisible in life. In the floristry industry’s promotional materials, they mostly are.
Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta had her first miscarriage in 2015. The anniversary of it came and went. The second anniversary came. On that day, someone sent her flowers.
She still doesn’t know who sent them. The anonymity is part of the story — that someone had held the date in mind, had remembered, had done something about the remembering, and had chosen not to be acknowledged for it.
“It made me feel so cared for,” she says. “So seen. Like someone remembered with me.”
She thought about it for three years. What the gesture had meant. Why it had meant so much. Why nobody in an industry built on expressing feeling through flowers had thought to do it before, or not systematically, not as a practice.
In 2020, she founded Evermore Blooms. The organisation sends flowers to mothers of miscarriage — on the anniversary of their loss, or on what would have been their baby’s due date. It operates through partnerships with local florists who provide their services at cost, or donate their design time, or waive the delivery fee. The flowers arrive with a note that says, in various forms: I have not forgotten. I am here.
The dates that Evermore Blooms marks are dates that the recipient never forgets and that almost no one else remembers. The due date that passed. The anniversary of the loss. In the ordinary calendar, these dates have no cultural recognition. They are not holidays. They are not commemorated. They pass in the way that private grief passes — quietly, carried alone, made heavier by the absence of external acknowledgement.
The flower, in this context, is not a celebration. It is a witness. It is the oldest function of the gesture, predating the commercial holiday by centuries, returning to something that Anna Jarvis might have recognised and approved of: the acknowledgement, made tangible, that the thing that happened was real, and that the person who experienced it is not alone in remembering it.
There is a material that sits at the bottom of most commercial flower arrangements. A dense green block, manufactured from phenol-formaldehyde — a plastic — that absorbs water and holds stems in place. It was invented in 1954 by Vernon Smithers, who sold the formula to Smithers-Oasis, a company that built a global business on it. For seven decades, it has been the invisible infrastructure of the professional floristry industry. The reason arrangements look the way they look. The reason stems can be placed at any angle with precise control. The reason the complex, architectural displays in hotel lobbies and wedding venues hold their form.
The florists who work with it every day breathe it in, absorb it through their skin, wash it down the drain at the end of the working day. They have done this, most of them, without thinking very hard about what it is. It is just part of the job.
A study by RMIT University in Melbourne, published in 2019, changed the conversation. Researchers found that floral foam — when it breaks down, as it inevitably does — releases microplastics into waterways. A single block contains the plastic equivalent of ten carrier bags. These microplastics are ingested by freshwater and marine animals. The chemicals they leach are, the study found, more toxic to aquatic invertebrates than those from most other plastic families. The florists using floral foam daily are exposed to formaldehyde, barium sulphates, and carbon black — compounds that occupational health research has long flagged as hazardous.
The Royal Horticultural Society banned it from their competitive shows in 2023. This was a signal of real consequence: the RHS Chelsea Flower Show is among the most influential horticultural events in the world, and the designers who compete there set aesthetic precedents that ripple through the broader industry.
Blooming Haus, a studio in London, went further. They eliminated floral foam entirely, replacing it with kenzans — the small, heavy, pin-studded discs that have been central to Japanese ikebana practice for centuries — alongside chicken wire, moss, and reusable water vessels. They became the first florist in the world to hold both Planet Mark and B Corp certification. The decision was not without difficulty. Foam shapes not just the physical construction of an arrangement but the entire logic of how floristry is practised — the angle of a stem, the stability of a complex design, the muscle memory of decades. Giving it up means starting again with new tools and different techniques.
They started again.
New alternatives are entering the market. A product called Sideau — manufactured without plastic — is beginning to find its way into professional studios. The transition is slow, as all genuine transitions are. But it is happening.
The point is not that every florist should switch overnight. The point is that the florists who are switching are making a material statement about their values — one that no amount of carefully worded copy can replicate or replace.
There are florists, in cities and small towns and coastal villages around the world, who have been quietly thinking about all of this for a long time. Who have been sourcing differently, speaking differently, stocking differently, training their staff in different questions. Not because they were instructed to. Not because a marketing consultant told them it was a good strategy. But because they noticed something — a letter that arrived in the inbox, a customer who flinched at a question, a friend who mentioned what May was like for her — and decided that noticing required a response.
Petal & Poem is a studio in Singapore that has published a guide for its peers on what they call sensitive Mother’s Day marketing. It reads, in places, like common sense. And perhaps it is. Train your staff, it says, to ask not “What are you getting for your mum?” but “How can I help you?” — a question that makes no assumptions about who the customer is or what they are carrying. Handle orders for memorial or remembrance flowers with discretion. Do not conduct a front-of-house conversation about the details of an arrangement intended for a grave.
These are not complex instructions. They require no significant investment of time or money. They ask only for the quality of attention — the willingness to consider, before speaking, who might be listening and what they might be carrying.
Bloom & Song, a studio in Hong Kong, published guidance of its own. “Not all relationships with mothers are positive,” it observes. “Some individuals may have strained or toxic relationships. For these customers, the holiday may evoke feelings of anger, sadness, or confusion.” The language is plain and careful and, in the context of an industry that has spent a century telling people to spoil their mothers, faintly radical.
Language matters. The word you use, the assumption it makes, the person it includes or excludes — these are not decorative decisions. The subject line that says “Celebrate Mum” is not the same as the one that says “For the ones who shaped you.” The question that presupposes a living, loved mother is not the same as the question that waits to find out who you are and what you need.
Some florists have redesigned their Mother’s Day collections entirely. Rather than a single category — Mother’s Day — they offer a range of arrangements organised around different kinds of care and different kinds of relationship. The grandmother who raised three generations. The teacher who saw something in you that you hadn’t yet seen in yourself. The friend who, over years and without ceremony, became the person you turn to first. The colleague who showed you, by example, how to be in the world.
The industry shorthand for this — chosen family — is a phrase that carries real weight for real people. For many people in LGBTQ+ communities, for people who have built their lives at a distance from their families of origin, for people whose biological families were a source of harm rather than shelter, the people who function as family are people they chose rather than were born to. These relationships are not lesser than biological ones. They are sometimes more sustaining, more deliberate, more present.
The florist who acknowledges this has not compromised the commercial logic of Mother’s Day. They have expanded it. They have said: there are more people here than you imagined, and they all have someone they want to honour.
There is a rhythm to the way florists who source locally talk about their work. It is slower than the rhythm of the broader industry. There is more pausing. More acknowledging of uncertainty. More willingness to say: this depends on the weather, this depends on the season, this depends on the farm.
Resnick at Butterbee Farm talks about her growing calendar the way a musician might talk about a score — something to be followed, to be interpreted, to be honoured in the particular conditions of the day. She knows what each variety asks of the soil and the light and the temperature. She knows which ones will push through a cold spring and which ones will not. She knows, by mid-April, roughly what she will have for Mother’s Day and roughly what she won’t, and she communicates this to the florists who work with her because she respects them enough to tell the truth.
This kind of communication — the florist to the grower, the grower to the florist, the florist to the customer — is itself a form of care. It treats the other person as someone capable of receiving honest information and making good decisions with it. It does not promise what cannot be delivered. It does not engineer a false abundance.
The customers who receive this kind of honesty, in Resnick’s experience, receive it well. They find the seasonal arrangement more interesting than the standardised one. They ask questions about what they’re looking at. They come back. They bring people. They tell the story of where the flowers came from because the story is worth telling.
The question of what flowers are for is older than the question of how to sell them. People have been giving each other flowers at least as long as they have been burying their dead — archaeologists have found evidence of flower placement in Neanderthal burial sites at Shanidar Cave in Iraq, dated to approximately 60,000 years ago. Whether the interpretation holds up under scrutiny is disputed. That the impulse holds up is not.
The flower has always carried meaning beyond itself. It has been given in grief, in love, in apology, in celebration, in memorial. It has been placed on altars and on graves and on tables set for dinner. It has been left at the scene of accidents and disasters by strangers who needed to do something with feeling that had nowhere else to go. It is, arguably, the oldest human technology for communicating something that language cannot carry cleanly.
The floristry industry, in the twentieth century, narrowed this to a simpler proposition. Flowers are for celebration. Flowers are for love. Flowers are for the designated occasions on the promotional calendar. This narrowing was commercially efficient and culturally impoverishing in roughly equal measure.
The florists who are doing the most thoughtful work now are engaged, in various ways, in a widening — not an abandonment of the commercial context but an expansion of it, a return to the full range of what flowers have always been able to do. To say: I remember. To say: I am thinking of you. To say: the thing you went through was real and I have not forgotten. To say: you are not alone in this.
There is a florist in an unnamed city — the details have been changed, but the story is composite and real — who rearranges her shop in the first week of May each year. The bright-pink displays move towards the back. In the window, she places white arrangements. Quieter colours. Forget-me-nots, when she can get them. Stems that carry memory rather than celebration.
She does not advertise this. She does not send an email that says: come to us if you are grieving. She simply changes the window. And the people who need what the window is offering — who have been walking past brightly decorated florists for two weeks, feeling invisible — find their way to her door.
“I don’t ask what it’s for,” she says. “I just ask what I can do.”
This is, in its way, the whole argument. The willingness to ask what you can do rather than what you can sell. The willingness to make room, in the arrangement and in the gesture and in the language of the transaction, for whatever the person standing in front of you is actually carrying.
The florists getting this right are not, in the main, large operations. They are small. They are independent. They are owner-operated, neighbourhood-rooted businesses where the person who grew the flowers and the person who arranged them and the person who sold them may be the same person, or a very small number of people who know each other and know their customers.
This is not a coincidence. The kind of attention that mindful floristry requires — to the provenance of the stems, to the emotional register of the occasion, to the customer standing at the counter and what they might need — is easier to sustain at smaller scale. It is harder to embed in a supply chain that spans three continents and employs thousands of people who will never meet each other.
This does not mean that large operations cannot do any of it. The Bloom & Wild opt-out campaign was not a small company’s initiative — Bloom & Wild is a significant online retailer. But the logic of the campaign was, at its core, the same logic that animates the small florist who changes her window display in the first week of May. Someone paid attention. Someone noticed who was not being served. Someone decided to do something about the noticing.
The Slow Flowers Society has nearly 700 members and continues to grow. Its membership is predominantly small farms and independent studios, but its influence extends well beyond the membership — into the trade press, into the conversations that florists are having with their suppliers, into the expectations that consumers are beginning to bring to the shops they choose.
Something is shifting. It is shifting slowly, as genuine shifts do. It is shifting without fanfare, without a manifesto, without any single organisation or individual driving it from above. It is shifting because a large number of people, working in flower shops and on farms and in delivery studios and at kitchen tables where they write their customer communications, are asking the same questions at the same time.
Who are we really serving? What do they actually need? What does it cost, in every sense of the word, to give it to them?
Back at Butterbee Farm, the morning light has lifted. The shadows in the row are sharper now. Resnick is building an arrangement for a local florist’s Mother’s Day order — sweet peas and ranunculus, the tail end of the tulips, some foliage that she grows for exactly this purpose, for the way it frames the flowers without competing with them. She is working on a kenzan. No foam. The arrangement will look different from the one in the supermarket. It will smell like something. It will have come from somewhere specific, from soil that someone tends, from seeds that someone chose, from hands that know their names.
She works without hurrying. The sweet peas, she explains, must be used quickly. They don’t keep. They are among the least durable of flowers — their stems are thin, their blooms are small, their vases of longevity shorter than almost anything else she grows. She grows them anyway because nothing else looks quite like them or smells quite like them or holds the particular quality of late-spring light quite the way they do.
There is something right about the fact that the most beautiful things are also the most fragile. That the gesture — the flower given, the arrangement made, the feeling carried from one person to another — has a lifespan. That it asks to be received now, while it still has what it came with. That it does not pretend to permanence.
This, perhaps, is what flowers have always known about the feelings they carry. That they are not monuments. They are moments. And the moment — of attention, of care, of noticing who is there and what they might need — is the whole point.
It was what Anna Jarvis wanted. It is what the florists who are getting this right have found their way back to, by different paths and at different speeds, through the particular and imperfect process of paying attention.
The flowers will still be sold. The holiday will still be observed. But something in the way they meet — the flower and the occasion, the florist and the customer, the gesture and the feeling it is meant to carry — is becoming, in small and real ways, more honest.
And honesty, in the end, is what the forget-me-not has always been asking for.