Cut Flowers: the final decision!

OK, so my two regular readers will know that I was given the task of providing the table decorations for my in-laws 50th wedding anniversary party on Saturday night. They wanted the usual cut flowers, but were prepared to have something different, so were pretty flexible.

Now, IMHO cut flowers are not a very sustainable option in many ways, including the pesticides and fungicides used in their production, the energy used in their production (many times in artificially climate-controlled hothouses), and the transport of the flowers (sometimes across the world), amongst other issues. So I decided to use flowering plants as an alternative.

The production of the plants then became an issue for me in that I wanted, if possible, to avoid using plants that had been forced to flower out of season, or were "soft" introduced species that had been mass-produced in hothouses, AND that were preferably produced locally, to limit the amount of transportation!

I didn't think that was such a big ask... but it was! The amount of information that is readily available to the average person on these issues, is really poor. I also wanted a native plant, but most native plants flower in winter or spring so the selection at this time of year is limited, and getting fourteen of the same thing was too much of a challenge. All very frustrating.

Anyway, to cut a long story short what I ended up with, after a last-minute post-gastro flurry of activity, was this:

The plant is an Australian native Birds Nest Fern. Even though it is called a "fern" it's actually reasonably hardy, both in terms of water-use and attention required, so the plants could be gifted to guests with a very reasonable chance of post-party survival, either as house-plants or in the garden in frost-free areas. They are relatively free from pests and diseases, so the preventative pesticides and fungicides used in their propogation *should* have been lower than many other plants, but this is really only my guess as a gardener, I don't know for sure.

The pots? They are plastic. Time was of the essence in the end, and as a matter of availability and convenience, that's what they ended up being. Even worse, they were imported from Holland :-( They are made from polypropylene, which means they are at least easily recyclable in domestic collection bins at the end of their life. A better choice (and one I would have investigated further had time permitted) may have been a natural, recycled or reused material such as rustic timber offcuts. That would probably have looked nicer as well. Another option would have been co-ordinated pots from second-hand or thrift stores.

The rims of the pots had sphagnum moss packed around the rim to disguise the inner black plant pot. Sphagnum moss is a living plant usually harvested from fragile peatlands, mainly in Tasmania, and is a really poor choice environmentally! I used it because I had a bag already from my non-environmentally minded days... Had I had to buy something, a much better choice might have been coconut fibre (coir), a by-product of the harvesting of coconuts.

The ribbon? Standard gold, wire-edged synthetic ribbon, chosen because it looked pretty and DH was in a rush. A better choice may have been natural un-dyed raffia, which is the leaves from a palm tree, although it is exported from Madagascar so there are some transport issues involved. The raffia would have also looked really nice with the recycled timber pots I had been looking for (although probably would have had to make myself).

So, not a fantastic outcome for me, but I did give it some thought, and I think that although the final decoration could have been "greener" so to speak, they were probably better than fourteen pots of cut flowers that would have been discarded after the event?