Irish-grown flowers: what it means and where to buy

About 95 percent of the cut flowers sold in Ireland are imported. The bunch on a supermarket shelf in Dublin has typically come through the Dutch auction system from a grower in the Netherlands, Kenya, Ethiopia, Colombia or Ecuador, and has been in transit and cold storage for the best part of a week before anyone here sees it.

That is not a scandal. It is what makes a five euro bunch possible in February, and it is why you can have roses in a country with our light levels. But it does mean the phrase "Irish flowers" on a label deserves a closer look, and it means the small number of flowers actually grown here behave differently in ways worth understanding before you pay more for them.

What Irish-grown actually means

Three things follow from a flower being grown here, and they are the whole case.

It is seasonal. An Irish grower works with Irish light and Irish weather. That gives a season roughly from February to October, with a long, generous middle from May to September and very little at either end. There is no Irish peony in September and no Irish sweet pea in March, because the plants will not do it. A farm that offers everything all year is buying in.

It is mostly field-grown. Some Irish growers use polytunnels to stretch the shoulders of the season, but the bulk of what they sell is grown outdoors in soil. Field-grown flowers look different: more variation between stems, more movement, occasional insect damage, and varieties chosen for how they grow rather than how they survive a lorry. Ammi, cornflower, scabious, larkspur and old garden roses are common on Irish farms and rare at the auctions, because they are too soft to travel.

The chain is short. This is the part that actually shows up in a vase. Vase life starts at the moment of cutting. A flower cut on a Thursday morning in Carlow and sold at a market on Saturday has spent two days of its life getting to you. An imported equivalent has often spent five to eight. Same flower, same variety, and a material difference in how long it stands in your kitchen. See the vase life table for what those ranges look like.

The trade-off, stated fairly

Irish-grown flowers are not cheaper and they are not available year-round. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

On price. A small Irish farm is competing with growers who have equatorial light, twelve-month seasons, industrial scale and labour costs a fraction of ours. It cannot win on price and it does not try to. A hand-tied bunch from an Irish grower generally sits somewhere between a supermarket bunch and a florist bouquet, and often closer to the florist end. Delivered gift bouquets from anywhere in Ireland mostly sit in the 40 to 70 euro band, and Irish-grown is no exception.

On season. From roughly November to February there is very little. What Irish growers sell in that window is foliage, berried branches, seedheads, dried flowers from the summer, and forced bulbs such as hyacinths and paperwhite narcissi. The first genuinely Irish flowers of the year are snowdrops and hellebores in January and February. The month-by-month calendar sets out what is real in each month, including the two months where the truthful answer is "not much".

On reliability. Weather decides an Irish crop. A wet June flattens the larkspur; a cold spring pushes the peonies two weeks late. Growers will tell you this themselves. If you need a specific flower on a specific date, particularly for a wedding, an Irish grower will usually offer you a colour palette and a season rather than a variety list, and that is the right way to work with them.

On the environmental argument. Air freight from East Africa and South America carries a real carbon cost, and a field-grown Irish flower avoids it. The comparison gets less flattering if you are comparing a heated Irish tunnel with an unheated Kenyan field, which is why the Irish growers worth their salt lean on field-grown and seasonal rather than on food miles alone.

The scale of it

Irish commercial flower growing is small but no longer marginal. Flower Farmers of Ireland, the volunteer-led association that represents growers here, has over 100 member farms, spread from west Cork to Leitrim and everywhere between. Most are small: some members work a few square metres of cutting garden, others several acres.

What changed in the last decade is not the volume so much as the model. A great many of these farms sell direct, so the margin that used to go to an auction, an importer and a wholesaler stays with the person who grew the flowers. That is what makes a one-acre farm viable at all. The flower farming movement here covers what they grow and how that side of it works.

Four ways to actually buy Irish-grown

Farm gate. Plenty of growers sell from the farm itself, some by arrangement and some from an unstaffed stand at the gate with a cash box, on set days. This is the cheapest way to buy Irish-grown and by some distance the freshest. It requires you to live near a farm, or to be willing to drive.

Farmers markets. The most reliable route for most people. A stall at a Saturday market is often selling flowers cut the day before or that morning. Markets in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Kilkenny, Carrick on Shannon and dozens of towns carry a flower stall through the season, though very few of them run through the winter.

Florists, in season. A good independent florist will buy Irish when the quality and the price work, and will tell you which stems in a bunch are Irish if you ask. This is worth asking about directly rather than looking for a label, because there is no protected mark on Irish-grown flowers and shops are not required to state origin. If a florist cannot say where a flower came from, it came through the auctions.

Direct from the farm, delivered. A growing number of Irish farms post subscriptions and one-off bunches nationwide, cut to order. This is the option that gets Irish-grown to someone in a town with no market and no nearby farm, and it generally sits at a florist price point rather than a supermarket one.

The practical starting point for all four is the county-by-county finder on the Flower Farmers of Ireland site, which lists each member's own site and what services they offer.

When not to bother

There are times when Irish-grown is the wrong answer, and it is worth saying so.

If you need flowers delivered tomorrow to an address you have never been to, national delivery services will do it and most small farms will not. If a bereaved family has asked for a specific traditional arrangement, an Irish grower in February may not have the flowers for it. If you want a specific colour matched exactly across forty table arrangements, a wholesaler is the tool for that job.

The right way to use Irish-grown is to buy it when it is in season and let the season decide what you get. That is also, not by coincidence, when it is at its best and its cheapest.