Fawn over Flora
‘Slow flower’ movement brings locally sourced, fresh-cut flowers for Mother’s Day
vibrant buttercups and snapdragons bunched together with mint, pampas grass and branches poking through, Jennifer Fowlow’s bouquets look like they were picked fresh off farmland.
And they were. The “slow flower” movement — a surge in homegrown flowers over imported grocery store bouquets — is the new esthetic blooming in the floral business. This local, natural trend is leading florists to use what’s in season in their bouquets — be that vines, bean stalks or roadside weeds.
Scroll through Instagram and you’ll find thousands of messy, haggard and beautiful arrangements under the #slowflowers hashtag. You will also see the breadth of the movement’s creativity.
At Wild North Flowers in downtown Toronto, Fowlow and team use all types of greenery with vibrant staples such as Peruvian lilies and Lisianthus flowers.
She will trim branches, gather herbs, such as mint, and cut weeds from the alley behind her house or pulled from the side of a highway to give arrangements a natural look.
“Each flower tells you where it wants to go. You pick up each stem, the lines the way it’s curved, and make the decision one by one where to go,” says Fowlow, who opened Wild North last spring and charges $75 to $200 per bouquet.
Her studio works with100-per-cent local flowers bought from growers across southern Ontario from Dundas to Prince Edward County. “We’re not manipulating the flowers to create some unnatural shape.”
Traditional arrangements were designed tightly and vertically, emphasizing the bulbous shapes of classic flowers. But the trend in today’s flower design is toward arrangements that flop sideways in uneven bunches, flowers that look like they would in the wild.
“There seems to be a step back toward appreciating things in their natural state,” says Sas Long, owner of Floralora Flowers, a 2.6-hectare Prince Edward County flower farm. She has started to grow bean stalks, cherry tomatoes and egg plants on the farm along with many flowers that are difficult to import, such as bearded irises and pincushion flowers, all of which she’ll sell to florists around Ontario for use in “slow flower” bouquets.
“I think esthetically it’s a much more pleasing look than the traditional bouquets and arrangements than people had been making in the past,” she says over the phone while birds chirp in the background. “Peo- ple have access to way more varieties of flowers now than just getting what are imported.”
The esthetic trend goes hand in hand with what has been coined as the “slow flower” movement by Seattle-based writer Debra Prinzing.
“The floral design community has been so innovative in just working with what’s available,” says Prinzing, who named the movement in her 2013 book Slow Flowers after the similar “slow food” culinary surge of the last decade. In the U.S., about 20 per cent of flowers sold are grown domestically, Prinzing says. With the “slow flower” movement, that number is improving, and floral esthetics too are evolving.
“(Going local) means your palette of colours is going to be quieter in the winter months, especially in Toronto,” she says, though that doesn’t mean customer demand has changed entirely. “There’s always going to be that bride who wants white hydrangeas in January.”
But many florists, including Wild North’s Fowlow, are nudging clients toward local, seasonal choices for ethical reasons.
“I was shocked when I found out how not environmentally friendly the fresh flower industry is,” Fowlow says. “They’re grown in another country; there are chemicals used to make them survive a journey across the world; they have to be shipped in air-conditioned planes and trucks; everything is wrapped in plastic. By the time the florist buys them they’re already a week old.”
The local varieties come together six times in Toronto every year at the Toronto Flower Market, 1001 Queen St. W. It was started by Natasa Kajganic to showcase a couple dozen growers, a few florists and educate consumers about local flowers.
“That point the flower is in a vase on your table — that’s the last point of its life. There’s a whole series of things that happen before that,” she says. Many florists and growers believe Kajganic has helped propel the slow flower movement in Ontario with the market in its fifth season.
The local movement has taken hold globally. Prinzing has heard from florists and growers in Italy, France, the U.K. and Australia who are adopting slow flower practices.
“Florists are figuring out there’s a better way to beautiful,” she says.