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The dream to create a flower farm on a rooftop began at the end of my driveway, waking up in a bucket of garden roses. I had just launched The Beautiful Bunch, and was unloading the last of the flowers I’d bought at market. The roses were waiting in the morning sunshine, their silky petals and heady scent a rare delight amidst the bleakness of the covid pandemic and relentless Melbourne lockdowns. Whilst the pandemic had led to an excess of stock at market, these particular flowers had been hard to obtain.
Garden-style, fragrant roses are not abundant in a commercial setting and are therefore always in demand. I ordered one of only three rose buckets available. To secure these, I had to be at market at the exact time the gates opened (3:15am), and as I was still new to buying, was told if I wasn’t there by 3:30am, they would be sold to someone else.
Despite living in the fever dream that is caring for a newborn baby, I arrived just after 3am, and those roses were mine. From the dark petals, emanated a classic old rose scent – rich and warm, like crushed blackberries and overripe plum. The blooms were large and cup-shaped and had started to unfurl, forming a beautiful rosette and painting a vibrant depth of crimson colour throughout.
Feeling drained from months of starting my day half way through the night, and having almost finished unloading all of the flowers, I sat down next to the bucket of roses, savouring the sunshine and absorbing their fragrance. As I was sitting down, I felt light headed, and darkness followed not long thereafter. When I woke after what I could hope was only minutes later, my whole face was in the rose bucket. My cheeks had crushed half the petals, which, now bruised, had left inky blotches on my skin.
Sleep or any form of rest, really, was elusive in those first months. The enduring demands of creating a business which starts at 3am, and the additional challenges of doing so during a pandemic, had begun to take their toll. Add to this a three-month old baby, and involuntary micro-sleeps were always startling, but not an uncommon occurrence.
Standing slowly, I must have been liminal dreaming because as I came to, a clear image formed of the women I worked with, The Beautiful Bunch girls, and I, arms full of colour, harvesting in a huge rose field. I wiped my cheeks, salvaged the unharmed rose bunches, and attempting a much slower pace, went on with the day.
In the four years that have passed since that morning, the team in our floral studio has sourced, prepped, and lovingly-arranged over 80,000 rose stems. These roses have delivered messages of sorrow for those lost, joy for new life and loves, and just about everything in between. Florists will always exist because people need flowers for the words we cannot say.
Yet despite the symbolic language of flowers and the venerable position they have held for centuries, increasingly, they are grown in ways which are severely damaging for the health of the people who love them and the planet we live on.
In an Australian context, more than 50% of all cut flowers sold here are imported. Many of these flowers are grown on farms with terrible working conditions and wages, where workers are exposed to dangerous chemicals and abuse and exploitation is widespread. Additionally, the carbon cost of a single stem can be huge. Supply chains in the industry are long and flowers imported to Australia and elsewhere are often air-freighted to multiple countries in refrigerated planes before reaching their final destination. Time is crucial, as for every day spent travelling, flowers lose 15% of their value.
Once they arrive here, The Department of Agriculture and Water Resources requires that all propagatable flowers and foliage imported into the country are devitalised in order to meet our strict biosecurity laws. This essentially requires flowers to be dipped in herbicide, glyphosate, more commonly known as Roundup, for a minimum of twenty minutes, in order to prevent propagation and the spread of foreign disease. This means that your imported roses are technically dead by the time they get to you.
If roses doused in chemicals with a high carbon cost, and harvested by workers making less than minimum wage is not very appealing, the bad news is, unlike almost every other item on Australian shelves, flowers do not require country-of-origin labelling, so imports are mixed with locally grown blooms.
As florists, we know that the best flowers are the ones grown closest to you. Our devotion to beauty and to sharing the splendour of the natural world means that we willingly wake in darkness to source local, one-of-a-kind crimson-coloured roses, with a scent like overripe plums, in the hope they will bring some joy to your day. Yet, in the four years since launching The Beautiful Bunch, stems that embody our social and environmental values have been almost impossible to find.
Shortly following the dream that prefigured this project, a business client of our ours, receiving a weekly floral vase arrangement, asked if we could source flowers for him that were sustainably grown. Before telling him how difficult, or perhaps impossible that would be, I started researching why.
That research eventually led to this initiative, Rooftop Roses, because the why became clear, but the why not was never something we could accept. If to plant a garden is to believe in the future, then we are planting the seeds for exactly the kind of future we want to live in. It’s one where flowers are grown with care, not chemicals, and in place of a production model built on worker exploitation, instead, the women tending to these roses will gain the skills and financial independence they need to find meaningful work and chase their dreams.
Nowhere are the shortfalls of the current system more palpable than when our love for the natural world contributes to its very destruction. The flowers we send should signal an awareness of the profound responsibility we have to leave the earth and her people in better shape than we found it.
What started as a dream, has inched closer to reality as the first phase of Rooftop Roses has received funding. I would love you to join us on this journey as we work to bring this big vision to life, growing roses for you and those you love. Roses that build a brighter future and will always be worth us waking in darkness for.
Jane x