Approximately 99% of individuals believe that a person who gives flowers is thoughtful, but are they really thinking about where their beautiful gifts are coming from? A new book called Foraged Flora aims to explain exactly why we should be looking at flowers the same way we look at produce.
Author Louesa Roebuck tells her readers that while we all know it’s bad to eat “pesticide-laden” produce, the same thing is essentially happening when we buy out-of-season roses from out local supermarkets.
Roebuck’s thesis behind Foraged Flora is that rather than simply purchasing flowers for their beauty, consumers should be focused on creating arrangements that consist of local, seasonal flowers and plants.
To co-author Sarah Londsdale, this process means exploring “the depth and breadth of what can be achieved relying solely on gleaning and foraging.”
According to the CCFC, almost 90% of consumers don’t know where their flowers originated. Roebuck and Londsdale suggest that if everyone expressed the same kind of concern about flora as they did about avocados, the market would be more educated and environmentally conscious.
Foraged Flora encourages its readers to stick with local offerings. For some, that might mean a lack of flowers in the winter, but considering that a single rose bloom shipped from Kenya requires over three gallons of water to produce, the decreased environmental impact could be huge.
Locally grown flowers can not only make a healthier world, recent studies have shown that local gardening can help children grow into healthier adults.
Whether it’s a vegetable or flower garden, researchers have learned that those children who learned to garden at a young age ate a diet that consisted of more fruit and vegetable consumption.
Researchers polled 1,351 students at eight American universities and found that students who currently gardened or learned to garden as a child ate 2.9 cups of fruits and vegetables per day, as compared to the 2.4 of those who had never gardened.
However, simply having a garden wasn’t enough to influence these behaviors. According to the survey results, kids who actively learned to garden were the ones who grew to eat more fruits and vegetables.
Roebeck and Lonsdale’s 250-page coffee table book is an advocate for creating beauty that is both local and self-reliant, which for some may even include cultivating flora of their very own.