It may be more heartbreaking than hearing your Thanksgiving dinner is wasteful or your Halloween chocolate is problematic. But yes: Those Valentine’s roses do have an environmental cost.
The majority of cut flowers this time of year are flown in from Colombia and Ecuador on refrigerated airplanes, burning through fossil fuels. Commercial flower farming has also been linked to other environmental problems, such as toxic pesticides and extensive water use. To be truly climate-conscious, you might consider skipping the luxury of winter flower bouquets.
However, there’s some nuance to this decision. You can probably still put together a more climate-friendly bouquet at the most humble flower stand if you know what to look for.
Roses are red, tulips might be greener
“The carbon issue is definitely one that people are asking about,” said Debra Prinzing, the author of the book “Slow Flowers” and founder of an online directory for buying flowers locally. “But not everybody, including myself, is equipped to do that calculation.”
Researchers have assessed the total carbon costs for some flower crops, but each stem in a bouquet could come from a different country and be grown in a different way, making the math tricky.
One way to simplify things is by buying a classic bunch of tulips. This is the only flower mass-grown in the United States in the winter on such a scale that you can find them at most local shops. And the majority of tulips sold to Americans are shipped by truck for relatively short distances.
It hasn’t always been that way. About a decade ago, “most of the supermarkets were dominated by Dutch tulips,” said David Kaplan, a longtime Rhode Island-based flower importer and distributor.
Walmart said that most of their current tulips were grown domestically. Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and the Kroger grocery chain are often supplied by a grower in Virginia. There are major tulip operations in New Jersey, the state of Washington and across the border in southern Ontario and British Columbia.
Together, Canadian and American farms grew 253 million tulips sold in the U.S. in 2023, the last year for which full statistics are available. That was four times as many as the Dutch supplied that year. In other words, if you bought tulips for Valentine’s Day in 2023, there was a good chance that they were fairly locally grown.
Some flower farmers have turned to them partly because they can be grown in abundance.
“You can grow a lot of tulips in a very small space in a fairly small amount of time,” said Jennifer Kouvant, who co-owns a Hudson Valley farm. “In our pretty small space of, I would say, 18 by 25 square feet, we’re able to grow about 20,000 to 30,000 tulips over a two- or three-month period.”
Making tulips bloom early — tricking them into experiencing an early “winter” by first cold-storing the bulbs until they root, then simulating spring by heating and lighting them — is an age-old practice, but it’s seeing a “renaissance,” said Kouvant. Her farm sells a five-week tulip-bouquet subscription that starts in February.
The greenhouse conundrum
This surge in the local growing of tulips doesn’t solve every environmental problem, though, since many North American tulips are greenhouse-grown. If the greenhouses are highly automated and consume a lot of electricity that was generated by burning fossil fuels, the tulips can still be carbon-intensive, according to Rebecca Swinn, a U.K. researcher who published a carbon-life-cycle analysis for some U.K.-sold flowers and ran some rougher calculations on the U.S. market.
Only 13 percent of Virginia’s power, for example, is renewable. “This factors in significantly,” she said.
Still, after looking at the major growing states’ power mixes, “it is a fair assumption that U.S.A.-grown tulips would have lower overall emissions than roses imported from Colombia,” she said, adding that small-scale growers like Kouvant in Hudson Valley would have “much lower emissions.”
The math could still improve as big growers build on-site renewable energy.
It’s also getting more common for smaller American growers to force other spring flowers into bloom around Valentine’s Day, including anemone, ranunculus and sweet peas, said John Dole, a horticulture professor at North Carolina State University.
Think outside the bouquet
Don’t forget other gift ideas: candles, tickets to a show or — this can’t fail — a handmade love letter.
If you want longer-lasting flowers, you could gift dried or pressed arrangements. Or consider a spring flower subscription from a local farm, or a wintertime tulip one. (This map might help you find some nearby.) For foodies, maybe a bouquet you can eat? One high-end grocer has a “radicchio not roses” campaign.
But if a box of bitter produce would spoil the romance, all is not lost. Try buying tulips or another cool-weather flower, and take a minute to ask where they were grown. Try to skip the cellophane wrapping. And of course, compost that bouquet.
