When Heather Henson snips a stem of lisianthus—think a rose-like flower layered with flamenco skirt ruffles—from her garden in July, she’s picking a flower with solid provenance. At the end of January, on a day with a low just shy of –11°C, the Cold Lake flower farmer planted 4,000 seeds to grow this lisianthus and others. She then tended the notoriously finicky crop, checking daily as she moved the trays from heat mats and grow lights into a small greenhouse on her deck and ultimately to a large polytunnel on her farm until it was harvested six or seven months on. From seed to the day the bloom was cut, Henson knows every step of this beauty’s story. For her, that’s everything. “You can get flowers from me, or you could go buy stuff that’s sprayed and flown in at the grocery store,” she says. The fact that her flowers are easy on the planet is a “bonus” for a lot of her customers, she says. But for her “it’s the whole point.”
Henson started her flower farming business in 2013, first growing in her yard and then adding a half-acre farm in 2017. Back then, next to nobody was focusing on locally grown cut flowers, she says, and for advice she found two farmers in Saskatchewan. Now “there are oodles.” Other than large commercial growers, the cut flower industry isn’t well tracked by provincial or federal agriculture—“When I do my taxes I still have to circle ‘other’ when it comes to crops,” Henson explains—but a meetup of flower farmers in central Alberta last winter had over 50 participants. The business of flower farming, particularly small-scale producers growing for a hyper-local market, is on the rise in the province and is creating an alternative to traditional floristry, an industry that relies almost solely on imports.
The flourishing of businesses providing Alberta-grown blooms direct to local consumers is a revival of sorts. In 1906, for instance, Walter Ramsay left his job as a school principal and took a chance on plants. He erected nine massive greenhouses, each about three-quarters the length of a curling rink, in what is now downtown Edmonton, and grew roses, carnations and chrysanthemums to supply his flower shop.
The business of flower farming, particularly small producers growing for a hyper-local market, is on the rise in the province.
And at Blackfalds, near Red Deer, Central Alberta Greenhouses covered eight acres, growing flowers to supply its seven flower shops. Started by Walter and Myrtle Good in the 1930s, the family-run retail–grower operation passed through three generations and survived for over 70 years. Kim Wickwire, a recently retired horticulture instructor at Olds College, worked at one of the company’s retail shops in the late 1980s and recalls that most of their flowers, including “some of the best roses,” came direct from the farm.
Wickwire taught the floriculture courses at Olds College starting in 1989, drawing on her experience in growing and selling flowers and in floral design (creating arrangements). The college’s horticulture program was started in 1963 by Buck Godwin, who included curricula to support Alberta’s floral industry. Godwin tested annuals and perennials for field and greenhouse cultivation and was always on the lookout for foliage, including grains or shrubs such as pussywillow, that could add interest to arrangements. He was well known for his dried flowers and grasses, and perfected techniques to maintain colour and form, which he recorded in the manual Alberta Supernaturals. After retirement, Godwin cultivated his own farm and supplied fresh and dried flowers to florists throughout western Canada. This included sales on the farm, explains Wickwire: “Florists wanted fresh, and were more than willing to come out to Olds from Calgary, Red Deer or wherever, weekly.”
Ramsay, the Goods and Godwin, as well as various other growers providing cut flowers throughout the 1900s and into the early 2000s, showed that Alberta farms could supply the floral industry for at least part of the year. But—like a child plucking petals one by one from a daisy in a game of you-love-me, you-love-me-not—a parade of cumulative changes over the past decades has largely sent floriculture, quite literally, south.
Imported flowers have been part of floriculture almost since the first commercial flower shops opened. Ramsay brought some stock from other suppliers to his Edmonton shop. In Canada, flowers delivered from BC and Ontario extended the season for florists and added variety. (Those provinces are still the biggest producers of cut flowers in Canada.) These were bolstered over time by imports from California, Florida and the Netherlands. But flowers were still considered a luxury, and the cost reflected that. Wickwire says you only need to look at wedding bouquets. Her mother, married in 1948, had a bouquet of tule with just a few carnations. “It was all ribbon,” she says. “[Bouquets] still had flowers, but they were dear.”
Not long after that wedding, changes that impact how we get much of our goods—and what we expect to pay for them—accelerated. Expansive highway networks, refrigerated trucks and improved air travel meant that flowers could be shipped from greater distances. The floral industry added more players: flower brokers, wholesalers, shipping experts and more, with attendant infrastructure such as massive refrigerated warehouses.
While flowers from South America were part of the floral industry even as far back as the 1980s, in 1991 the US government enacted the Andean Trade Preference Act, which encouraged South American farmers to develop viable alternatives to coca cultivation and cocaine production. This move was followed by various trade agreements, including the 2011 Canada–Colombia Free Trade Agreement that saw tariffs on various products, including cut flowers, reduced or eliminated. Today about 30 to 35 fully loaded flights per day leave Bogotá, en route to Miami, the flower distribution hub in North America. From there, they’re flown or trucked to wholesalers across North America. In 2021 Canada imported $123-million in cut flowers, of which about 70 per cent came from Colombia and Ecuador, with the US and the Netherlands making up the bulk of the rest.
The movement of a large chunk of the industry to South America, where days are long and labour is cheap, makes it almost impossible for Canadian growers to compete. Local production of the “big three”—carnations, roses and chrysanthemums, popular for their longevity and their variety of colours and forms—went into free fall. Carnations were the first to go. They all come from South America now, says Jill Langille of Pacific Coast Floral Wholesale.
Rosalie Wesenberg, whose grandparents started Central Alberta Greenhouses, saw the change first-hand. She remembers when her family stopped growing carnations in the late 1970s. Eventually they had to import the flower from Colombia to supply their own shops. They stuck with roses the longest, but finally took the last acre out of production in 2004. The entry of grocery stores into the cut flower market was the coup de grâce for many local growers. Grocery stores have power because of volume, says Langille, adding that they’ll book their roses for Valentine’s two years in advance to get a fixed price. Today, Canada has just one large commercial rose grower: Eurosa Farms on Vancouver Island.
Wading into the bleak landscape of flower farming could seem like folly given how the last half-century has gone. But a new wave of growers in Alberta are betting they can carve a niche in the traditional flower market with their fresh, seasonal, specialty “slow flowers.” They can offer more-delicate products, like sweet peas, that don’t travel well, and there’s the bonus of supporting small, mostly women-owned businesses and infusing energy into rural communities, agriculture and agritourism.
Henson first got her inspiration while living in Belgium, where her husband was posted. “People there spend a chunk of change on fresh flowers every week,” she says, “and I was fascinated by this.” She started buying weekly flowers too, and loved how they changed seasonally—hyacinths and tulips only in the spring, for instance. Back home in Cold Lake she missed these flowers and wondered if there might be a market for seasonal blooms. There was, and her business now offers bouquet subscriptions and elaborate dried flower and foliage bouquets that extend her season. She avoids using dyes, paints or bleaches, uses no preservatives, and grows the flowers without pesticides or herbicides. When they’ve reached the end of their natural life, she encourages tossing them in the compost.
Henson shares her thoughts on the sustainable flower-farming business with her friend Clara Qualizza of Meadow & Thicket Farm Flowers in Wildwood (an hour west of Edmonton) in their The Sustainable Flowers Podcast. She knows that most people don’t want to know the back story of every bloom, but she’ll grab opportunities here and there, in social media and personal conversations, to inject the message that ethics, not just aesthetics, can be part of flower purchasing decisions.
Growers in Alberta are carving a niche in the traditional market with their seasonal “slow flowers.”
Kristen Primrose, of Primrose Lane Farm, near Cardston, takes a similar approach. Farming near Waterton Lakes National Park gives Primrose and her husband, who also raise Highland cattle on their 130 acres, an added sense of responsibility. They make all their own compost, practise “no till” to preserve soil integrity and use trees and wind fences to harvest snow. Their goal is to plant 100 trees or bushes a year to help stave off drought, filling their ponds and creating “a little microclimate of nature,” Primrose says. She has a subscription bouquet service, does the occasional wedding—specializing in elopements—and hosts U-pick days and workshops. These in-person events provide opportunities to share her commitment to seasonality and sustainability.
Many of Alberta’s new flower farmers are serving as one-stop shops for consumers by providing floral design as well. Moira MacKinnon of Edmonton’s Love & Fantasy Flowers came to the industry as a florist, but her early exposure was disheartening. “Right away I kind of knew that something wasn’t right,” she says, noting the “tons of [floral] foam”—the single-use plastic foam that’s ubiquitous in the industry—and heavily packaged imports. But serendipity knocked, and she was able to move to her grandparents’ large suburban house, where she dug up the lawn and planted flowers. She quickly grew her business, which now includes a one-acre farm just west of Edmonton, and started by biking her flowers to farmers markets in a trailer tricked out to look like a chuckwagon. The chuckwagon and market sales are retired—her business model is now flower subscriptions, weddings and other events, and workshops. But still she’s aiming to overcome the industry’s big stumbling block: putting locally grown flowers into the hands of florists.
Even if a florist is philosophically interested in bypassing traditional floristry chains for even a fraction of their flowers, it’s tough practically. They currently have access to massive wholesalers with the click of a mouse. And they need flowers in volume and that meet standards such as stem length. To address these challenges, MacKinnon piloted the Cooperative Flower Network in 2023, which linked 11 Edmonton-area growers with 30 buyers. CFN sets product standards, and, by pooling flowers, can provide florists with the volume they need at a central location for once-a-week purchasing. Year one was so successful that MacKinnon is considering two more hubs in central Alberta and in Calgary.
They’re largely self-taught because there’s “not a lot of information out there for cold-climate growers.”
This sort of co-operation is a theme that echoes through the nascent industry. Growers reach out to fellow growers and share knowledge over coffee or through workshops, and scour the library and internet for resources, but they’re largely self-taught. “There’s not a lot of information out there for cold-climate growers,” says Primrose. The floriculture part of the horticulture program at Olds College, notes Wickwire, was cut in the mid-1990s amid declining government funding.
Luckily for Alberta farmers they have one of Canada’s leading advocates for the industry right here at home. Creating a sustainable floristry culture in the province and across North America is the fuel that fires Becky Feasby, a Calgary-based farmer–florist who’s operated Prairie Girl Flowers since 2018.
Like MacKinnon, Feasby got her first exposure to the industry through traditional floral design. She started a course but couldn’t stomach to finish it. “I saw that a class of about six students would fill two bins of garbage,” she says, adding that there was no effort to use alternatives to floral foam, to compost foliage or to recycle anything. She began searching for a better way.
An online search led her to the Slow Flowers Society, spearheaded by Seattle, Washington-based Debra Prinzing. Feasby was emboldened by seeing that others shared her view that floristry could use modernization. She’s since become a leader in sustainable floristry in Canada. To meet the need for education, Feasby started the annual Sustainable Flowers Workshop in Calgary in 2019, with courses for growers and florists alike that tackle the three pillars of sustainability: environmental, social and economic.
Feasby cares and thinks deeply about floristry, giving the industry the scrutiny she thinks it deserves, given that flowers are so pervasive in people’s lives. She’s currently working on her masters in sustainability at Harvard University, comparing the environmental and social costs of growing roses in North and South America, weighing the nuances such as the carbon costs of heating and cooling greenhouses in colder climates against places where such inputs aren’t necessary.
She’s encouraged by the interest in locally grown, sustainable flowers. She says she knows the people driving it in Alberta are smart and committed and want to see things get done, but she’s also ever vigilant about ways the industry could be co-opted. Her workshops and social media posts challenge what sustainability means in the floral space, questioning the ethics of wild foraging, for instance, or of using invasive species in designs. She also advocates for making the industry more inclusive.
At the end of June, Prinzing, with Feasby’s encouragement and help, will bring the Slow Flowers Summit to Banff, the first time this three-day event—with its workshops and presentations on sustainable floristry—will be held outside the US. That it will come to Canada and have a full slate of Canadian presenters is testament to the flourishing industry here. MacKinnon and the Cooperative Flower Network will supply the workshops and demonstrations, delivering buckets of seasonal fresh flowers and foliage from the farms of Alberta growers, just a few hours from field to vase.
Adrienne Mason’s most recent book is Whales to the Rescue (Kids Can Press, 2022). She helped launch Hakai Magazine.
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