I don’t use the phrase life-changing lightly, but my trip to Kenya in June really was.
I’ve worked with flowers for most of my adult life. I’ve been to markets, auctions and growers, I buy flowers every week, and I spend a lot of time talking about where they come from and how they are grown. Even with all of that, I wasn’t prepared for the scale of what I saw in Kenya.
Over four days we visited three flower farms. Between them, around 300 million stems are grown. That number is almost impossible to comprehend until you are standing in the middle of it.
Rows and rows of flowers disappearing into the distance. Huge growing areas. Teams harvesting, grading and packing flowers by hand. Refrigeration, transport, water management, propagation, crop management — all happening on a scale that is completely different from anything I had seen before.
And yet what struck me most was how incredibly controlled and immaculate it all was.
Seeing how the flowers are actually grown
As a florist, you spend most of your time seeing the finished product.
A box arrives in Wimbledon, we condition the flowers, check every stem and start working with them. You know there is an enormous amount of work behind that box, but seeing it happen first-hand is quite different.
The attention to detail on the farms was extraordinary.
We saw crop rotation, cover crops and biological methods of pest control. We saw huge reservoirs and systems designed to collect, clean and reuse water naturally. The equatorial climate gives growers very consistent daylight without the same need for additional heating that many growing regions have, and we saw examples of energy efficiency and renewable energy being used across the farms.
None of it felt like sustainability had been bolted on afterwards because somebody thought it would look good in a brochure. It was simply part of how the farms operated.
Water is valuable, so it is managed carefully. Waste costs money and resources, so it is reduced or reused. Healthy plants produce better flowers. Good soil matters. Efficient systems matter.
There was a great deal of science behind everything, but equally an enormous amount was still done by hand.
That combination surprised me.
300 million stems — but still very human
The scale could easily make the whole thing feel industrial.
It didn’t.
The strongest memory I came home with was actually the people.
There were a lot of people working across these farms, and everywhere we went there was an obvious sense of pride in what they were doing. People wanted to show us their section, explain the process and demonstrate how things worked.
We saw staff training, healthcare provision, meals, community programmes and schemes designed to recognise and reward good ideas and better ways of working.
One of the concepts used on the farms was Kaizen — continuous improvement. The people actually doing a job are encouraged to suggest how that job could be improved, made safer or made more efficient.
That really stayed with me.
We saw food being grown, meals being provided and even by-products from the farms being put to use rather than simply thrown away. There was a very clear connection between the farms, the people working on them and the communities around them.
Before going to Kenya, I probably thought mainly about sustainability in environmental terms.
I came back thinking much more about people as well.
It changed how I look at an imported flower
There is sometimes an assumption that the closer a flower is grown, the more sustainable it must automatically be.
The reality is far more complicated.
Growing conditions matter. Energy use matters. Water matters. Yield matters. Transport matters. Waste matters. And the social impact of growing flowers matters too.
Standing on a farm close to the equator, where flowers can be grown using natural light and without the heating requirements that would be necessary elsewhere, makes you look at that question rather differently.
That doesn’t mean every Kenyan flower is automatically sustainable, any more than every British or Dutch flower automatically is. There isn’t a single simple answer.
But it reinforced something I think we have always instinctively done at Gardenia: look at the whole picture rather than relying on a label.
We buy through a network of growers, wholesalers and specialist suppliers. Depending on the flower and the time of year, the best stem for us might have been grown in Britain, the Netherlands, Kenya or somewhere else entirely.
Our job is to understand that supply chain better and make informed choices.
Flowers look slightly different to me now
There was one slightly strange consequence of the trip.
When I got back to Gardenia and started looking at the flowers in the shop, they somehow looked different.
I could picture the farms.
I could picture somebody cutting the stem, somebody grading it, somebody bunching it and somebody packing the box.
I had seen just how many decisions, people and processes sit behind something that ultimately ends up in a vase on somebody’s kitchen table or in a bridal bouquet.
We work with a natural product that has travelled through a remarkable chain before it reaches us.
Seeing the beginning of that chain first-hand was quite humbling.
It also made me more determined that when we talk about sustainability at Gardenia, we talk about it properly. Not sweeping claims, and not pretending there are simple answers where there aren’t any.
For us that means asking where our flowers come from, choosing suppliers carefully, reducing waste, sending our floral green waste through COM:POST, using 100% home-compostable, plastic-free flower wrapping and packaging, and making the mechanics used in weddings and events as sustainable as the design safely allows.
There is always more to learn.
Kenya certainly taught me that.
And, without wanting to overstate it, I think the trip genuinely changed the way I look at the flowers I work with every day.
