Flowers, foam and the story I nearly kept to myself

2 days ago

3 min read

This week I stood up in front of a room full of people at Deanery Synod and proposed that our Deanery backs a move away from single-use plastics and floral foam in our churches.

It follows a motion General Synod backed earlier this year, encouraging churches to use local, seasonal flowers and to avoid floral foam, which breaks down into microplastics.

I answered questions about foam: what it is, why it matters, what to use instead. All good, useful stuff. But as I sat back down, I knew I'd held something back. Something personal, and probably the real reason I care so much.

So I'm going to say it here instead.

Eight years ago

About eight years ago I kept hearing the same concerns from other flower growers and natural florists about what floral foam is actually made of. When I joined Flowers from the Farm, I decided Hope & Glory would be foam-free. No exceptions.

Around the same time, my mum started having trouble breathing.

Mum had been a florist her whole working life. Every arrangement, every wedding, every funeral tribute: floral foam, every single day.

Over eighteen months I went with her to appointment after appointment, in department after department, searching for a cause. We were clutching at straws. We just wanted a name for what was happening to her.

What's in the green brick

Floral foam is a plastic, made from a phenol-formaldehyde resin. When it's cut, soaked and handled it gives off dust, and the chemicals in it, including formaldehyde and phenol, are known irritants to the eyes, nose and lungs. Formaldehyde is classed as a carcinogen.

Sitting in those waiting rooms, I couldn't help wondering. Could the thing she'd handled every day for decades be behind this?

The answer

It wasn't. Mum was eventually diagnosed with Progressive Bulbar Palsy, a rare form of Motor Neurone Disease that affects speech, swallowing and breathing. Nothing to do with foam.

I want to be really clear about that, because this isn't a scare story.

But those eighteen months changed how I saw the stuff. I'd read enough to know I didn't want to breathe it, I didn't want my customers breathing it, and I didn't want it crumbling into microplastics in our soil and water. So I stopped using it, stopped selling it, and I've never looked back.

Flowers don't need foam

Here's the good news: you really don't miss it. Florists managed beautifully for generations before the green brick arrived, and we're managing beautifully again now.

At Hope & Glory we use:

Chicken wire and moss for church arrangements, pedestals and wreaths
Pin frogs (kenzans) for low, sculptural designs
Reusable vessels and water tubes for hand-tied and table pieces
Willow, hazel and twigs woven into frames and structures
Seasonal, locally grown flowers that last because they haven't travelled across the world

Why I'm telling you now

The Church of England is now encouraging every parish to move away from foam. That's thousands of church flower teams, many of them volunteers, who'll be asking, "So what do we use instead?"

I'd love to help answer that. And the next time someone asks me about floral foam, I want to tell the whole story, the way I've told it here.