‘Don’t say it with roses’. The school leading a green revolution in floristry

Thinking of treating your beloved to a bouquet of roses this Valentine’s Day? Florist Cissy Bullock (pictured above, right), who founded the School of Sustainable Floristry along with flower farmer Lucy Copeman, urges you to think again. British roses won’t bloom until spring, and you could do much better, she says, than a bunch of imported flowers grown on an industrial scale and flown thousands of miles around the globe.

If you’re intent on gifting blooms, could you instead find a local flower farmer, or a florist who sources their produce locally? Depending on where you live, they might be able to offer you some early flowering scented narcissi – rich with symbolism about rebirth and reflection. Or perhaps a cluster of branches with early prunus blossom or fragrant winter flowering honeysuckle. Maybe you’re lucky enough to have a garden – or know someone who does – containing delicate snowdrops. A handful of them would make a romantic gift, Bullock says: “They smell beautiful.”

This celebration of local and seasonal flowers is at the core of what she and Copeman are teaching the next generation of professional florists. Members of the public are also invited along to their workshops at the school in Howbury Hall, a majestic Grade-II listed building with its own flower farm on the outskirts of Bedford.

On a crisp, bright February day, a small group of women have gathered here to learn the art of winter floristry. They include Claire Lukmanji, a cabin crew flight manager and floral enthusiast, and 17-year-old Eloise Howe, an apprentice to Bullock who describes the school as having been “lifechanging” for her, giving her new confidence in her own abilities.

After a morning spent touring Copeman’s flower farm in the estate’s 18th century walled garden, and assembling bouquets of fresh winter blooms, the group is dressing a long dining table for lunch in the Great Hall. A white tablecloth and a twisted muslin are draped over hidden Tupperware boxes for dramatic effect. As they position snowdrops and Paperwhite narcissi in little bud vases under Bullock’s guidance, she explains how her own interest in floristry took seed.

In 2015, having just given birth to twins in the UK after more than a decade working in Beijing and Singapore, she spotted a professional floristry course that ran on weekends. “I’m quite impulsive. It just landed in my lap, and I thought: ‘That’s what I’m going to do. I can build a business around my family, around the kind of life I want to live.’”

While her mother took care of the babies, Bullock was able to “escape” to the course. “It was so beautiful and mindful, and then while I was looking after the twins, I was also daydreaming about flowers. I just think, honestly, it stopped me from developing postnatal depression. I knew that this was the craft I’d been looking for.”

However, Bullock felt frustrated by the strictures of conventional floristry training and was determined to make her own business more sustainable. She opted for old-fashioned reusable chicken wire (“the sustainable florists’ mechanic of choice”) rather than the single-use plastic floral foam commonly used to hold flowers in place for arrangements.

She also decided she would only work with naturally grown British flowers, even in the colder months. “I kept hearing traditional florists saying: ‘British flowers don’t last as well.’ That made me really cross, because they do last,” she said. “You just need to know how to handle them, and you can’t be as rough with them because they haven’t been dipped in liquid nitrate.”

After lunch – vegetable dishes followed by plum and blackberry crumble with custard, all prepared with produce grown on the estate – the group construct a dried flower arrangement on the hall’s imposing staircase. Bullock shows them how to remove the papery sheaths from lunaria pods to reveal a pearlescent colour underneath, saving the seeds inside to grow new plants. Once the display is complete, with gothic twisted willow and contorted hazel branches, she pronounces it “very Miss Havisham”. Participants gather their own bouquets of dried flowers to take home.

Where else do you get that incredible scent that sweet peas bring into your home? They are staggeringly more beautiful than some forced, senseless, ramrod-straight imported flowers

Over steaming mugs of tea around the kitchen table as Copeman’s pointer dog Daisy dozes in her basket, she and Bullock explain how their partnership began. In 2021, with the pandemic having dried up her usual supply chains and a wedding on her books, Bullock found Copeman through Flowers from the Farm. It’s a trade association of British flower farmers, whose board Bullock now sits on. Copeman recalls the conversation: “Cissy rang me up and said: ‘Have you got any dahlias? I’m desperate and no one has them.’ And I told her that I had loads.”

The pair hope to encourage ethically conscious consumers to make the same informed choices about the flowers they buy as the demographic is increasingly doing with food. Bullock wants the public to know that the vast majority of flowers sold in the UK have been imported, having been farmed as monocrops: a single type of crop is grown year after year on the same land. This depletes the soil to such a degree, she says, “that you have to hammer in all the [artificial] chemicals, the fertiliser, the pesticides, to replenish it, because the nutrients have all gone. You have to use pesticides because you’ve killed off all the pollinators. And you have issues with flash flooding, because the soil’s lost the ability to absorb rainwater.”

Conversely, British flowers that are “agroecologically” farmed without pesticides – and without the high carbon emissions of artificial lighting, heating and international transportation – can even have environmental benefits, feeding and supporting the pollinators we desperately need to maintain healthy soils and grow food crops.

In the same way that shoppers have been encouraged to embrace wonky carrots, the School of Sustainable Floristry wants people to see beauty beyond the artificially preserved blooms grown in the “industrial floristry complex”.

Copeman enthuses about the fleeting joy of sweet peas, for example: “Where else do you get that incredible scent that you bring into your home? There’s nothing like it, and they are staggeringly more beautiful than some forced, senseless, ramrod-straight imported flowers.”

The pair are heartened by recent reports of British flowers blossoming in popularity. “I really believe that values-led consumers are already changing the sector,” Bullock says.

“In the same way that people are asking: who grew my food? Who made my clothes? I think they should be asking: Who grew my flowers?”

Coming into bloom

Using research by Rebecca Swinn, who leads the Soil Association’s Innovative Farmers programme, Flowers from the Farm reports that:

• Dutch lilies have the highest carbon emissions, followed by Kenyan gypsophila, Dutch roses and Kenyan roses
• A British-grown mixed bouquet produces around 10 times fewer carbon emissions than an imported mixed bouquet
• An outdoor-grown, local bouquet of mixed garden flowers is estimated to have even lower CO2 emissions: around 5% of a Dutch or Kenyan bouquet

Photography: portraits of Cissy Bullock and Lucy Copeman by Roger Bool. Workshop shots and close-ups courtesy of the School of Sustainable Floristry