NASHVILLE — If you happen to haven’t but ordered flowers for tomorrow, you’ve seemingly waited too lengthy. Valentine’s Day accounts for some 30 p.c of annual cut-flower gross sales — greater than the vacation season does, greater than even Mom’s Day — so it’s very seemingly that every one the florists on the town are already booked. You’ll have higher luck at your native grocery or big-box retailer, however you’re kidding your self in case you suppose this gesture received’t be acknowledged for what it’s. Nothing says “I forgot Valentine’s Day” fairly like a plastic-wrapped bouquet from a bucket by the checkout line at Goal.

Simply as properly. The huge cut-flower business — valued at $34 billion in 2019 — isn’t probably the most environmentally prison of all business enterprises, nevertheless it’s removed from benign.

As the Sustainable Floristry Community factors out, cultivating unblemished flowers requires liberal purposes of pesticides and herbicides, and plenty of of these poisons enter the water system (to not point out the pores and skin and lungs of agricultural employees). Imported flowers have to be handled with fungicides, as properly, to forestall international microbes from wreaking havoc on home agriculture. The floral foam generally utilized in cut-flower preparations is yet one more contaminant, leaching poisonous chemical substances into the water provide and creating a major supply of microplastic air pollution in waterways.

Then there’s transportation. Most commodity flowers — together with 80 p.c of the minimize flowers bought in america — are grown within the International South and transported to clients in Europe and North America. However not by container ship, like the overwhelming majority of imported commodities. Flowers are fragile and extremely perishable and have to be transferred by way of refrigerated jets after which by refrigerated vehicles. As soon as on the florist or big-box retailer, they have to be stored in precise fridges.

When he was a senior aviation researcher on the Worldwide Council on Clear Transportation, Brandon Graver did the mathematics on the annual carbon value of transporting Valentine’s Day flowers from Colombia alone, concluding, “Flying that a lot sweet-smelling cargo burns 114 million liters of gasoline and emits roughly 360,000 metric tons of CO₂.” For comparability, he famous, “A forest bigger than the realm of Houston (1,624 sq. kilometers) can be wanted to sequester that quantity of carbon.” If you happen to add the carbon value of the flowers’ protecting packaging and of getting them to clients’ doorways, you’d want an even bigger forest nonetheless.

If all that is information to you, it could be engendering a certain quantity of despair. Isn’t there something left that we’re allowed to view with unalloyed pleasure? If not a bouquet of vibrant flowers within the useless of February, then what?

Fortuitously, there are lots of methods to say, “I really like you” that don’t additionally say, “Eh, I don’t actually care that a lot concerning the planet.” I’m a giant fan of affection letters and walks within the moonlight, myself.

If in case you have your coronary heart set on giving flowers — or flower-adjacent items — you can take into account paper flowers. I’ve seen attractive handmade peonies on-line that I couldn’t inform from the true factor. Or for the green-thumbed, a pleasant houseplant would possibly work. The recognition of indoor vegetation exploded throughout Covid: 71 p.c of North American greenhouses noticed elevated gross sales in 2020.

The environmental influence of the home houseplant market will be laborious to parse, nevertheless it isn’t benign, both, involving a number of the identical issues with pesticides, water use and transportation as minimize flowers. However there’s nonetheless a giant distinction between domestically grown houseplants and imported flowers, and never simply within the relative carbon prices of transportation. Houseplants aren’t discarded two days after Valentine’s Day.

I’ve a ficus tree that I purchased for my first faculty condominium. Over the 40 years since I introduced it residence, it has moved with me to Philadelphia; Columbia, S.C.; and 4 Nashville properties. Once we added a display porch that blocked the sunshine to the one room the tree slot in, it went to stay at a neighbor’s home. Twenty years later, it got here again to our home as a result of our neighbors had adopted a pandemic pet and wanted a spot to place his crate. Which was wonderful by us, as a result of we’d turned the display porch right into a sunroom by then and had house for the ficus once more. Certainly one of our sons rolled it down the road on a dolly, his head completely obscured by the foliage. Birnam Wooden to Dunsinane to Nashville.

Nonetheless, the perfect environmental various to a bouquet of imported flowers most likely isn’t a potted plant and even paper flowers. The perfect various, I’d argue, is a neighborhood flower farm, ideally one which operates in keeping with regenerative farming ideas. It’s doable to assist sustainable flowers via reward playing cards, retail gross sales at farmers’ markets or community-supported agriculture subscriptions. A flower C.S.A. works very similar to a produce C.S.A.: Prospects present the farmer with a dependable supply of revenue, and the farmer gives a dependable supply of recent, in-season flowers (or, in winter, foliage and berry-laden boughs). Usually the flowers are fragile heirloom varieties that will by no means survive a visit from South America.

I discovered about flower farmers from “Sluggish Flowers: 4 Seasons of Domestically Grown Bouquets From the Backyard, Meadow and Farm.” This 2013 guide by Debra Prinzing began a whole gradual flower motion. She now has a web site and a podcast aimed toward serving to individuals discover sustainable alternate options to imported flowers for events large and small or simply for the pleasure of getting recent flowers in the home. This idea, she writes, is an “artisanal, anti-mass-market strategy to celebrations, festivities and floral items of affection.” Her website gives a searchable database of flower farms and florists dedicated to domestically sourced flowers.

Certain, it’s simpler to seize a plastic-wrapped bouquet from the grocery retailer and examine Valentine’s Time without work your checklist. It takes a little bit extra thought and a little bit extra planning to ship flowers — or vegetation and paper flowers — one other method. It may cost a little a little bit extra, too. Give it some thought, although: If you really want to economize or time, it’s so much sooner and so much cheaper to write down a heartfelt love letter and go for a stroll within the moonlight. However if you wish to give the one you love a botanical reward, why not make it a present to the planet, too?