Sustainability in the Real World
- Jessica Stewart
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
I have been thinking about sustainability in floristry for more than a decade, and I think I believe in purity less now than I did when I started.
Not because I care less.
But because I understand more.
When I first started asking where my flowers came from, the question felt relatively straightforward.
I was in my early twenties, had just dropped out of Columbia for grad school, and I knew that I cared deeply about where my food came from. I was helping to run a CSA in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. I knew the farmers growing my food, and I cared about their land and their labor and seasonality.
A few things from back in my NYC flower days:
And eventually I had this very obvious realization: I care so much about where my food comes from. Why don’t I know where these flowers came from?
That question changed my career.
I started buying locally grown flowers. I started meeting farmers. Those farmers introduced me to other farmers. I started seeing local flowers next to imported flowers at the New York flower market and realizing that the local product wasn’t some rustic ethical substitute for the “real” thing.
Often it was better.
Eventually I stopped buying imported flowers altogether. I stopped using traditional brick floral foam. Those choices became foundational to the business I run today.
But sixteen seasons of doing this work have also made me wary of any version of sustainability that depends on pretending we can make beautiful things without consuming resources. We can’t.
I’m a florist living in a time of profound climate crisis.
That never sucks less to say aloud.
My job is to find, buy, transport, keep cool, hydrate, arrange, install, style, dismantle, and eventually dispose of living things for celebrations that usually last one day.
There is no version of that with zero environmental impact.
Flowers require land. They require water. Flowers need to be kept cold. Refrigeration requires energy.
We drive vans that run on gas.
We wash buckets and drop in a little bleach now and then.
Sometimes flowers grown in another part of the US travel a very long way to reach Pennsylvania because somebody is getting married here in March and Pennsylvania is still Pennsylvania in March.
And at midnight, when my team has sixty minutes to dismantle a wedding and we are carrying wet, heavy plant material through the dark, I use contractor bags.
I have tried environmentally friendlier garbage bags. They were all trash, literally.
And eventually you have to admit that sustainability that only works under ideal conditions isn’t particularly useful to people working in the real world.
I don’t think the answer is to stop caring.
I think the answer is to get more specific.
Here's a glimpse into all the questions on my mind while I plan your wedding flowers:
Where did this flower come from?
Who grew it?
How far did it travel?
Can I buy this from somebody closer?
Can this mechanic be used again?
Can this vessel be rented instead of purchased for one day?
Can these flowers be donated?
Can this material be composted?
Can this living plant go into the ground afterward?
Can this cardboard box become bouquet transportation instead of trash?
Can I use that rubber band again?
Can I ask a farmer a year ahead to grow something for this wedding?
Can I make the better choice here, even if I can’t make a perfect choice everywhere?
That is much closer to what sustainability means to me now.
Local is not a halo.
I love local flowers.
I will evangelize about local flowers all day.
But “local” is not a magic word that makes everything environmentally innocent.
A local flower still required resources to grow. It may have been grown in a heated It needed water. Someone drove it somewhere.
And of course there are still questions worth asking. What I love about local flowers is not that they allow me to stop asking questions.
It’s that they let me get closer to the answers I like to hear.
I can know the farmer. They can tell me straight up about their IPM strategy and the things they’re doing to support their team’s well-being.
I can know the season.
I can know what is actually growing. I see lists from over 30 local flower farms every week and I have a week-to-week forecast of our whole region that I use when planning for next year’s weddings.
I can call someone a year before a wedding and say, I have a couple getting married in August who would lose their minds over this flower. Are you growing it?
Sometimes that farmer can plant more. That’s an entirely different relationship to the material. Local is geography, but local is also relationships.
And relationships makes it harder to pretend that products simply appear for our consumption.
Seasonality means accepting limits.
This may be one of the things I find most valuable about seasonal design in an age when we are accustomed to being able to order almost anything, from almost anywhere, at almost any time.
Nature says no sometimes. Not dramatically. Just practically.
That flower isn’t blooming. That crop failed. That color isn’t available.
The heat changed things. The rain changed things.
This other flower is spectacular instead.
The season gets a vote.
I don’t experience that as deprivation. I think limits can make design better. Just like in my college poetry classes, constraint and formal rules can give you something fantastic to push back against or grow more beautiful inside of.
Instead of asking, “How do I obtain exactly what I want regardless of season or geography?” the question becomes: What is beautiful here, now?
That is a very different relationship to abundance.
I still make compromises.
I am a year-round florist in Western Pennsylvania.
If somebody gets married in March, I cannot buy an abundant wedding’s worth of locally field-grown flowers here.
So I buy American-grown flowers from warmer places.
Some of those flowers travel thousands of miles.
Sometimes they travel by air. I don’t love that. I haven't been on an airplane since 2018 and I don't think I'll fly again any time soon because of the carbon footprint of air travel.
I have decided that supporting American flower farms and maintaining our commitment to American-grown flowers is still meaningful enough to make that tradeoff.
Someone else may draw the line differently, and I think that’s okay.
What I don’t want to do is hide the tradeoff so that I can continue calling myself sustainable without discomfort.
The discomfort is useful. It keeps the questions alive.
Sustainability is also about labor.
I don’t think we can talk seriously about sustainability while treating the people doing the work as another resource to consume.
A wedding is not sustainable because the flowers were grown nearby if the farmer can’t make a living growing them.
It isn’t sustainable if the florist undercharged so badly that she has to work sixteen hours without eating.
It isn’t sustainable if an event plan requires five people’s labor but we’re trying to make three people perform it because staffing costs money.
It isn’t sustainable if workers are expected to tolerate unsafe conditions because a couple paid a lot of money for the event.
The people are part of the system too. I care where the flowers came from. I also care what happened to the humans while getting them there.
And sustainability is not an aesthetic.
This matters enormously in weddings.
Sustainable does not have to look brown.
It does not have to look rustic.
It does not have to involve kraft paper and mason jars and an aggressively beige moral superiority.
Some of the most extravagant-looking weddings we make are built from locally grown flowers, reusable mechanics, rental vessels, candleholders we have used dozens of times, and materials that will be composted afterward.
You can have beauty, abundance, spectacle.
The question is not whether we are allowed to make beautiful things while the planet is in crisis.
I think humans are always going to make beautiful things.
We are going to gather.
We are going to mark births and deaths and marriages and transitions.
We are going to decorate the places where those things happen.
We’ve been doing that for a very long time.
The question I am interested in is: How do we continue making beautiful things while paying attention to what they cost the world around us?
I don’t think guilt is a particularly good design tool.
I don’t want couples looking at their wedding flowers and calculating whether they have morally earned them.
I don’t want sustainability to become another wedding-industry performance where people have to purchase the correct objects to demonstrate that they are good people.
I want us to pay attention.
Those are different things.
Attention asks:
Where did this come from?
Who made it?
Who grew it?
What happens to it next?
Do we need it?
Could we reuse something?
Could we choose something already abundant?
Could we support somebody nearby?
Could we waste less?
Could we design differently?
Could we make the same celebration beautiful with fewer disposable things?
Those questions are useful. Shame usually isn’t.
I think there is danger in wanting a clean answer.
The climate crisis is enormous.
A wedding florist using a cardboard box twice is not going to solve it.
Neither is composting the centerpieces.
Neither is refusing floral foam.
Neither is buying locally grown dahlias.
I don’t want to exaggerate the significance of small business choices in the face of a problem this large.
But I also reject the opposite conclusion: If my choices cannot solve the whole problem, then my choices don’t matter.
That’s too convenient. I feel that I’m responsible for the little ecosystem I actually control. My studio. My purchasing. My mechanics. My waste. My vehicles. My connections. The recommendations I make to clients. The things I normalize within my corner of the wedding industry.
That’s where I have agency. So that’s where I work.
I think sustainability is a practice of remaining awake.
Maybe that’s the best definition I have now.
Not purity or innocence or winning something.
Not a certification that means I can stop thinking about it.
Staying awake is what's up for me. Noticing the contradiction between making temporary beauty and living through a climate crisis.
Noticing when a better material becomes available.
Noticing when the supposedly greener alternative doesn’t actually work.
Noticing how much water we’re using.
Noticing what we’re throwing away.
Noticing where the flowers came from.
Noticing who grew them.
Noticing who carried them.
Changing what we can.
Being truthful about what we haven’t changed.
And continuing to ask the question.
I don’t think I will ever arrive at a version of Bramble & Blossom where I can say:
There. We did sustainability.
I hope I don’t.
I would rather keep paying attention.
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