My soapbox moment at the 2018 Marlborough Food and Wine Festival
I have a very cool flower pal from Los Angeles who once remarked, in an effort to vocalise her take on the Kiwi way, “You don’t march!”. Her point being that other than perhaps nuclear way back, and the original Suffragettes even further back, Kiwis seldom get agitated or mobilised politically, relative of course to her reference as a young, urban and liberal American. We’re a pretty sedate bunch, really. And probably because we can afford to be.
This is a rather roundabout way of saying it occurs to me, we really do need to (ought to) stand for something (some Thing), right? Where we are. Even if “where” is placid, pedestrian, provincial New Zealand. (Paradise, put another way.)
This little talk or script is me standing for something, then… This is me “marching” – for flowers! Local, seasonal, organic flowers at that… Thank you for coming to hear me out.
I recall a revelatory moment I had many seasons ago, when I was still researching flower farming. I had reached out to the flower exporters in Auckland and wanted to know where the opportunities or niches lie. Among other things and given my location in Marlborough, I was told there is real scope for exporting Lilac branches to the US. I remember thinking, without even truly having crossed paths with the local flower movement, how “wrong” it felt – this idea that I would be growing something in provincial NZ that would then end up somewhere in the States, hopelessly out of season, and with a food mile equivalent to make your eyes water. I knew there and then, really, that growing for export wasn’t for me. What’s more is, I thought myself into the role of the hypothetical consumer, Stateside, who would fall over her feet to lay her hands on a few stems of NZ grown Lilac – overpriced and days and days old, roundabout Halloween time, if you can bear to picture it…
I also knew that consumer wasn’t “my” consumer.
As it happens I stumbled upon a beautifully affirmative sentiment back then by an American who was commenting on the availability of imported peonies at the opposite end of the season there, and how a peonie at Christmas was akin to having eggnog on the 4th of July. I couldn’t have expressed my sentiments better had I tried!
Seasonality, then, is a huge part of what I hope to leave with you today.
I am addressing you at a wine and food festival, so you’d be forgiven for asking, “Why flowers?”.
I think my thread today mostly has to do with provenance, and all it encompasses, in answer to that question. All the while I’m trying to impart a sentiment around the fact that flowers are and or should be part of the local produce posse. Seasonality and origin pertain as much to flowers as it does to food.
Is provenance, or where something comes from to put it simplistically, only relevant if we are imbibing it, or ingesting it?
I have often reflected that it is precisely because cut flowers are ornamental rather than edible that their provenance is overlooked, dismissed, and that the ethics of cultivating them are compromised. (We don’t care as much about how flowers are grown or where they come from because there’s no harm implied to our bodies.)
Though, do me a favour and pay close attention the next time you hand a bunch of flowers to someone… The first thing we humans do, without fail almost, is stick our noses in there and take a deep sniff. We can’t help but touch some of the more textural bits, too (toddlers are especially hopeless). We bring these blooms into the intimacy of our homes and behold them and commune with them for days. They mean so much to us… And yet we don’t know where they come from, who grew them and or how.
Yes, we don’t eat the flowers we are given in a bouquet, but let’s agree that flowers are also GROWN – just like vegetables – in soil, i.e. in the earth, and in a wider ecology, the wellbeing of which is of immense importance – to humans, animals and insects alike.
The arrangements I styled for this very venue was actually an exercise in illustrating that the line between what is ornamental and what is edible is a blurry one indeed. Sunflowers, for one, epitomise this duality; and then the gourmet (homegrown) capsicums I’ve used are such beautiful edibles I’ve employed them here as ornamentals, rather. Perhaps I never even intended eating them! Flowers in an edible sense are often herbal or medicinal in essence, i.e. they feed the body. In their purely ornamental form though, flowers feed the soul… they stimulate the higher faculties, if you like. And yet, we cannot feed our souls if we haven’t fed our bodies.
Do ornamental cut flowers have absolutely no utility, then? Other than being beautiful and making us happy, that is. They really do – have utility, I mean. Flowers are often used as a companion plant to vegetables, in a very utilitarian sense (the veggies NEED the flowers!). Think Marigolds with tomatoes, Borage with strawberries, Chamomile with onions, Cosmos with celery, and Sunflowers with cauliflower. I could go on.
My point is this: food and flowers (and wine and hospitality) go together. LOCAL food and flowers go together. We should care about both. Just like we do about fair trade bananas, free farmed bacon and banning single use plastic bags.
What’s an easy way of doing just that? Support your local farmer-florist.
And just like that we’re back at provenance.
What is a farmer-florist? A flower farmer who adds his or her own value, offering a range of floristry “products” and services (think gift bouquets, weddings, events, etc.) and who sells direct to his or her local community. (More often than not farmer-florists grow organically, even if not necessarily certified.)
So the rise of the famer-florist is also the story of local flowers, which can probably in some ways be traced back to Amy Stewart’s 2008 book, Flower Confidential, the Good, the Bad and the Beautiful. Names like Debra Prinzig, Tara Kolle, Jennie Love and Erin Benzakein followed, and concepts such as “slow flowers,” “field to vase” and “the fifty mile bouquet” were spawned, and the rest is a little like history. Debra Prinzig especially has made a colossal contribution with championing the idea of slow flowers, specifically. I adore the impactfulness of her grip on what slow flowers are about: origin, seasonality, and conscious consumer choice.
At the time of writing, the farmer-florist hashtag had 147 369 posts on Instagram, slow flowers 137 079, and field to vase 30 698.
I won’t delve deep into the New Zealand flower industry right here and now, suffice to say that there might be a small revolution of sorts brewing “in the middle,” and that’s right where we need it to. Our industry has bled novelty growers since the late 1990s and so is for the most part dominated by big, monoculture, high tech growers (note I don’t use the word “farms”). At the other extreme is the home garden, and somewhere between these two poles the farmer-florist comes into being, always on a real farm or at least field, always diversified, and always able to offer a mixed bouquet of deliciously novel or nostalgic blooms, in season, grown close to its market, and known to and in its community. Have I mentioned it’s all to do with provenance?
Since we’re at a wine festival right here and now, what I’m on about is analogous to the concept of terroir…
Wikipedia refers to the “unique environment contexts, farming practices and a crop’s specific growth habitat” as having a collective character, i.e. terroir. “Some artisanal crops for which terroir is studied include wine, coffee, tobacco, chocolate, chili peppers, hops, agave (for making tequila and mezcal), tomatoes, heritage wheat, maple syrup, tea, and cannabis.”
I’ve arrived back at the beginning – yes we don’t eat cut flowers, but ultimately we should care about how they are grown, by whom and where. In short, the provenance of cut flowers is in some ways also a terroir of sorts.
To conclude, if I may seize this lovely little soapbox so… Hospitality is the height of (our) civilisation. And it is nothing if not food and wine and conversation. I believe hospitality is only ever completely complete with the inclusion of fresh flowers. My crop deserves a seat at the local produce table and I hope to have inspired you all a little to think again about flowers, their place in our lives, in our communities and especially their provenance.
Thank you for coming to listen!
