Grief, infertility, estrangement, toxic supply chains and the humble forget-me-not: inside the slow, imperfect, commercially motivated, and surprisingly moving effort to make the world’s most sentimental holiday a little more honest
There is a woman — call her Sarah, because she asked not to be named — who has not bought flowers for her mother on Mother’s Day for eleven years. Not since her mother died. In the days before the holiday, she closes her email, avoids the high street, and does whatever she can to get from the first Friday of May to the second Monday without being ambushed by a pink carnation.
It doesn’t always work. The promotional emails get through. The shop windows are unavoidable. The well-meaning colleague who asks, cheerfully, what are you doing for your mum this weekend? — she’s always there too.
“It’s not that I want the holiday abolished,” Sarah says. “I just want someone to notice that not everyone is celebrating.”
For most of the past century, the floral industry has operated as though Sarah does not exist. Mother’s Day — the second-biggest commercial event of the year for most florists, eclipsed only by Valentine’s Day — has been built on a remarkably simple assumption: that the second Sunday of May is, for virtually everyone, a day of uncomplicated joy. That the flowers in the window are an invitation everyone wants to receive. That the promotional email, fired off at four in the morning, arrives in an inbox without collateral damage.
That assumption has always been wrong. What has changed, in the last few years, is that a growing number of people inside the flower trade have started saying so — and doing something about it.
‘I had no idea so many people would find it so touching’
The story of how the floral industry began, however tentatively, to reckon with its own limitations starts with an email sent on a Sunday morning in March 2019 by a copywriter named Lucy, who worked for a London-based online florist called Bloom & Wild.
Lucy’s email was not clever. It was not particularly well-designed. It was four sentences long, and what it said, in essence, was: we know Mother’s Day can be hard for some people, so if you’d rather not hear from us about it this year, just say so — and we won’t ask why.
Almost 18,000 people said so.
“I had no idea,” Lucy told Grazia magazine afterwards. “I sent it on a Sunday because I thought people were more likely to look at their emails. I had no idea so many people would find it so touching.”
What they found touching was not the offer itself — opting out of a promotional mailing is, in most industries, a fairly unremarkable option. What they found touching was the acknowledgment behind it: that the company had noticed they might not be celebrating. That it had considered, before building its marketing system, who might be harmed by it. That it had done something, however small, about that.
The responses flooded back from the bereaved, from people in the middle of fertility treatment, from those whose relationships with their mothers were complicated in ways that “spoil her this Mother’s Day” could not possibly accommodate. People wrote: thank you for seeing us. The message, repeated in hundreds of different formulations, was essentially the same: we’ve been invisible to this industry for years, and you were the first to notice.
Bloom & Wild’s co-founder and chief executive, Aron Gelbard, was straightforward about what the campaign had set out to do. “Mother’s Day is really important to us and many of our customers, but also a sensitive time for many,” he said. “Offering our customers the ability to opt out of our Mother’s Day marketing communications allowed us to make the time of year that little bit easier for some.”
The commercial response was remarkable. On the day the campaign launched, the company’s social media engagement quadrupled. Not because the campaign was selling something — it was, in a conventional sense, selling nothing — but because it had done something that companies almost never do: it had treated its customers as people first.
In 2020, Bloom & Wild formalised the idea into the Thoughtful Marketing Movement, inviting other brands to commit to offering opt-outs from potentially distressing holiday communications. Over 100 companies eventually joined — restaurants, retailers, beauty brands. By 2021, the opt-out had been extended: customers who elected to skip Mother’s Day content would find no mention of the holiday anywhere on the website when they were logged in. Not on the homepage. Not in the navigation menus. Not on the product pages.
The idea reached Parliament. Matt Warman, a Conservative MP who had been orphaned at 27, raised the issue in the Commons, describing the “dread” with which many bereaved people approach the promotional season. He called for a voluntary advertising code, and cited Bloom & Wild as proof of concept. Health minister Jackie Doyle-Price agreed that firms should “show sensitivity”. It was, by any measure, a strange thing to be discussing in the House of Commons — and also, somehow, not strange at all.
The movement spread internationally: to Australia, where Mother’s Day also falls in May; to Singapore and Hong Kong; to florists and retailers who had never heard of Bloom & Wild but recognised, in the idea, something their own customers had been trying to tell them for years.
What had started as four sentences in an email had become, tentatively, a new way of thinking about what the industry owed its customers.
The people the holiday forgets
To understand why this matters so much, it helps to think carefully about who is actually on the other end of those promotional emails.
One in six couples in the UK experiences difficulty conceiving. Miscarriage affects roughly one in four pregnancies — and remains, despite its frequency, one of the most socially unacknowledged forms of loss. Grief does not resolve itself on the schedule that marketers tend to assume; bereavement researchers have found that the second or third year after a loss is often harder than the first, as the initial support structures fall away and the permanence of absence becomes undeniable. These are not unusual or niche experiences. They are among the most common things that happen to human beings.
And then there are the structural exclusions — the people who, by virtue of their family structure, their history, or their identity, have never quite fitted into the image that the flower industry has spent a century projecting onto Mother’s Day. The same-sex couple where both partners are mothers, only intermittently visible in advertising. The trans woman who is a mother but rarely sees her experience of motherhood reflected in the mainstream. The grandmother who has been the primary carer for years but is consistently portrayed as a secondary figure, someone to be honoured in addition to a mother rather than instead of one. The father who raised his children alone. The older sibling who stepped in when no one else did.
For all of these people — and, it must be said, for the people whose relationships with their mothers were characterised by neglect, or abuse, or simply a coldness that the language of “she deserves the best” refuses to acknowledge — the weeks before Mother’s Day are something to be endured. The bright shop windows and the urgent subject lines and the colleague’s breezy question are not invitations. They are reminders of absence, or of damage, or of a version of family life they do not have and never had.
“Not all relationships with mothers are positive,” notes a guide developed for the industry by Bloom & Song, a floral studio in Hong Kong. “Some individuals may have strained or toxic relationships. For these customers, the holiday may evoke feelings of anger, sadness, or confusion. It’s important for florists to steer clear of cliché messages that may alienate these customers.”
Steering clear is harder than it sounds when an entire industry has spent a hundred years pointing in the same direction. The cheerful default — spoil her, celebrate her, she deserves it, don’t forget — has its own momentum. Changing it requires not just different words on a website, but a different way of thinking about who the customer is and what she might be carrying when she walks through the door.
‘How can I help you?’
The florists who have taken this rethinking furthest have moved well beyond the opt-out email. They have changed the way their staff speak to customers.
The question “What are you getting for your mum?” — standard, well-meaning, asked thousands of times a day in thousands of flower shops across the country in the weeks before Mother’s Day — carries inside it an assumption so habitual it has become invisible: that the person being asked has a living mother, is on good terms with her, and is buying flowers for that purpose. The question excludes, in a single breath, everyone who has lost their mother, everyone who is estranged, everyone who is buying for themselves because the day is difficult, and everyone whose relationship to the holiday is something other than straightforward celebration.
The alternative is almost embarrassingly simple: “Who are you celebrating today?” Or simply, “How can I help you?” The shift in question, from closed presupposition to open invitation, costs nothing and changes everything about what the interaction feels like for the people it had previously excluded.
Petal & Poem, a Singapore-based florist that has developed a detailed guide for its industry peers on sensitive Mother’s Day marketing, goes further still. It advises that staff be trained to handle orders for memorial or remembrance flowers with particular discretion — no unnecessary questions, no front-of-house conversation about the details of an arrangement intended for a deceased parent, and a quiet, frictionless path to completing a purchase that carries grief. “Offer discreet service,” the guide says. “Ensure staff handle these orders with care and privacy.”
These are small adjustments. In aggregate, they represent a fundamentally different theory of the customer — one that doesn’t pre-assign every person who enters a flower shop to the demographic category of “person buying flowers for their living mother on a holiday.” One that makes room, instead, for the full and complicated range of human beings who actually shop for flowers.
Some florists have built this expanded understanding into their product ranges themselves. Rather than a single, undifferentiated Mother’s Day collection, they offer arrangements named for different kinds of care: the Nurturer, the Teacher, the Grandmother, the Mentor. Customers who have been primarily raised by someone other than a biological mother — who may have spent years feeling slightly beside the point of the holiday — find themselves explicitly addressed. The industry shorthand for this is “chosen family,” and while that phrase has the faint whiff of corporate branding about it, the reality it gestures towards is genuine and important: for many people, the people who functioned as mothers have no legal or biological relationship to them whatsoever. The neighbour who checked in every day. The teacher who noticed. The older friend who showed up, consistently, for years. These relationships are not lesser. They are sometimes more sustaining than the biological ones — and the florist who acknowledges them has both done right by its customers and, as a side effect, enlarged the pool of people who feel that the holiday has anything to offer them.
The woman who sends flowers to mothers of miscarriage
Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta’s first miscarriage was in 2015. On the two-year anniversary of the loss, an anonymous bouquet arrived at her door.
She still doesn’t know who sent it. “It made me feel so cared for,” she said. “So seen. It felt like someone had said: I remember too.”
She thought about it for three years. Then, in 2020, she founded Evermore Blooms — a non-profit organisation that sends flowers to mothers of miscarriage on the anniversary of their loss, or on what would have been their baby’s due date. It works through partnerships with local florists, many of whom provide their services at cost, or donate their design time entirely.
“These are dates a mother never forgets,” the organisation’s website explains. “But when they come around, her initial support system has faded or unintentionally forgotten. Remembering these dates means the world to a mother.”
Miscarriage affects roughly one in four pregnancies, making it simultaneously the most common pregnancy complication and one of the most silenced forms of grief in public life. The weeks around Mother’s Day — with their saturation of pink and their celebrations of living, present, celebrated mothers — can be among the hardest of the year for the women who have experienced pregnancy loss. What Evermore Blooms does is quiet, uncomplicated, and, by all accounts, profound: it says, with flowers, that the loss is not forgotten.
It is worth pausing on what this tells us about flowers as a form of communication. Flowers are not unique to celebration. They are at least as old, as a human gesture, in the context of grief. The forget-me-not does not need a caption; its name is the entire message. The florists who have started stocking them prominently in the first weeks of May — alongside the pink carnations and the yellow tulips and the arrangements optimised for Instagram — are participating in something older and, arguably, more honest than the holiday’s mainstream commercial register allows for.
“For these people,” wrote one Hong Kong florist, thinking about those for whom Mother’s Day is primarily a day of absence, “the pink carnations and yellow tulips in the florists’ windows represent a commercial optimism that does not match their situation. The forget-me-not matches their situation. It is the flower whose name is the entire message.”
The problem with your bouquet
So far, this is a story about emotional sensitivity — about who the holiday hurts and who is trying to reduce that hurt. But the reckoning inside floristry goes beyond the emotional. It extends, with equal urgency, to the supply chain.
Nearly 80% of cut flowers sold in the United Kingdom and United States are imported. The bulk arrive from Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, and Ethiopia — grown in vast, climate-controlled operations, harvested by workers on wages that the Western consumers who buy the resulting arrangements rarely think about, and transported by air freight to refrigerated distribution hubs across Europe and North America. Air freight is, by a significant margin, one of the most carbon-intensive modes of transport available.
The social costs are no more comfortable than the environmental ones. Cut-flower farms in the global south have faced decades of documented criticism over labour practices — low wages, poor safety protections, exposure to pesticide regimes designed to produce the unblemished, long-lived blooms that the British and American wholesale market demands. Certification schemes exist: Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, Veriflora. Some florists source exclusively from certified farms. But the market penetration of genuinely ethical supply chains remains, by most estimates, a small fraction of overall sales.
Into this landscape arrived Debra Prinzing, a Seattle-based writer and advocate who, in 2013, founded the Slow Flowers movement. Prinzing drew a direct analogy to the Slow Food movement — the same principles, applied to floriculture: local, seasonal, sustainably grown. “Grown not flown” is the philosophy reduced to three words. The Slow Flowers Society launched an online directory in 2014, listing florists and farms committed to the approach. A decade later, it has nearly 700 members.
The practical consequences of the philosophy are more demanding than the name implies. Local sourcing means seasonal sourcing. In early May in Britain, you have tulips in their final weeks, the beginning of sweet peas, and — if the spring has been kind — peonies. You do not have the year-round abundance of the industrial supply chain, which has engineered away seasonality entirely through temperature control, selective breeding, and the willingness to fly roses from Kenya at a moment’s notice. Amber Flack, owner of Little Acre Flowers in Washington DC, who sources almost exclusively from local farms, is clear about what this means in practice: “The closer to the source, the less distance there is to travel. That’s going to be a more sustainable option.” Laura Beth Resnick, of Butterbee Farm in Baltimore, is equally clear about the limits: “I can’t really grow roses in the mid-Atlantic so I don’t try.”
This kind of honesty — about what grows where, and when, and under what conditions — is itself, Prinzing argues, a form of integrity. It is also a marketable quality. In a landscape thick with vague sustainability claims and imprecise “eco-conscious” branding, the florist who can tell you which farm grew your peonies and when they were cut is offering something genuinely different. Customers who care about provenance are finding them, and returning.
The movement is not without its complications. It is, by definition, a movement for buyers with the means to pay a premium for locally grown, seasonally limited flowers. Its self-policing mechanisms are imperfect: some farms quietly market imported stock as domestically grown, and the movement acknowledges it has limited capacity to police its own edges. And the environmental logic compelling as it is at the level of individual purchasing decisions, does not resolve the question of what happens to the millions of workers in the Kenyan and Colombian cut-flower industries when British and American consumers decide to buy local. These are real tensions. They complicate the story without cancelling it.
The green brick
Lurking under the peony, literally, is a problem that the floral industry has been slower to address than almost anything else: the dense green block of plastic called floral foam.
Floral foam — invented in 1954 and a staple of the trade ever since — is the material that holds stems in position in commercial arrangements. It absorbs water, it is easy to cut, and it allows florists to construct the precise, architectural, slightly gravity-defying displays that have defined the commercial floral aesthetic for seven decades. It is also, as research has confirmed with increasing specificity, a significant environmental hazard.
A single block of floral foam contains the same quantity of plastic as ten carrier bags. It does not biodegrade. It crumbles into microplastics that enter waterways and are ingested by aquatic animals. Researchers at RMIT University in Australia found, in the first major study of its environmental effects, that the chemicals leaching from floral foam microplastics were more toxic to freshwater invertebrates than those from most other plastic families. The florists who work with it daily — cutting it, soaking it, disposing of it — are exposed to formaldehyde, barium sulphates, and carbon black as a routine occupational matter.
None of this is newly discovered. What has changed is the willingness to act on it. Since 2023, floral foam has been banned from RHS shows, including Chelsea — a signal from one of the world’s most prestigious horticultural institutions that the material’s convenience no longer outweighs its costs. Blooming Haus, a London florist that holds both Planet Mark and B Corp certification, has eliminated foam entirely, replacing it with kenzans, chicken wire, moss, and reusable water vessels. Plastic-free alternatives — including a new design block called Sideau, made without plastic — are beginning to enter the professional market.
But eliminating floral foam is genuinely difficult, and florists who attempt it on the busiest weekend of their year deserve more credit than the gesture typically receives. Foam changes not just the material under the flowers but the entire logic of how an arrangement is built — the angles, the precision of placement, the stability of a complex design. Giving it up requires relearning techniques, investing in new equipment, and accepting that some arrangements will look different from the industrial standard. For a small shop running on narrow margins, this is not a cost that can be absorbed without effort.
“We are committed to finding and supporting alternatives,” writes Blooming Haus on its website. “We understand exactly how harmful floral foam can be — and change is coming.” The tone is not triumphant. It is the tone of someone who understands that getting there is hard, and who has decided to try anyway.
Does being kinder make business sense?
It seems worth asking: is any of this commercially viable? Can you opt people out of your biggest sales campaign of the year, pay a premium for locally grown flowers, retrain your staff in empathy, and refuse to use the material that makes complicated arrangements easy — and still make a living?
The evidence, such as it is, suggests you can. And not just barely.
Bloom & Wild’s opt-out campaign did not reduce revenue. It quadrupled social media engagement. The customer loyalty it generated — the letters, the word-of-mouth, the particular trust that accrues to a company when it demonstrates that it has thought about the wellbeing of its customers — was worth considerably more than the promotional impact of 18,000 people who had removed themselves from the mailing list. Florists aligned with the Slow Flowers movement typically charge more for their arrangements than conventional competitors, and report customers who are more likely to return and more likely to recommend them to friends. The florists who have expanded their definition of motherhood find themselves with broader, not narrower, markets.
The average per-transaction spend among consumers who bought from local florists hit a record high in 2025. The Slow Flowers directory recorded its highest-ever traffic around Mother’s Day. The opt-out model has, as noted, spread to over 100 brands across multiple countries.
“Tearing up the rule book is always risky and nerve-racking,” acknowledges a report from communications agency PHA Group. “However, could a trailblazing approach to Mother’s Day help florists win much more valuable advocates for the remaining 364 days of the year and beyond?” The data, increasingly, suggests it could.
None of this makes the movement immune to cynicism, or to its own contradictions. Greenwashing is real, and the Slow Flowers movement acknowledges that some of its members’ claims of local provenance are imprecise at best. Opt-out campaigns can be — and sometimes are — deployed as a marketing stunt, a calculated exercise in brand positioning that looks like empathy but has little substance beneath it. Customers who have been on the receiving end of performative sensitivity tend to remember it.
The florists who are building genuine, lasting businesses on these principles can typically be identified by the fact that their values are visible in their practice, not merely in their copy. The foam-free workbench. The farm name on the price card. The member of staff who has been trained, in a genuine conversation with her employer about why it matters, to say “How can I help you?” rather than “What are you getting for your mum?” — and to mean it.
What Anna Jarvis got right
Anna Jarvis died in 1948, penniless, in a sanitarium in Pennsylvania. She had spent the final thirty years of her life attempting to undo the holiday she had spent the preceding thirty years creating. The white carnation she had chosen as its symbol was by then being sold at marked-up prices outside the very institutions she had founded the holiday to honour. The persistent, darkly plausible legend — never proved, never disproved — is that some of her medical bills were paid by the greeting card and floral industries she had devoted those final decades to fighting.
Jarvis had been, by most accounts, a difficult person: litigious, uncompromising, incapable of the accommodation that might have allowed her to influence the holiday’s development from within rather than railing against it from without. The industry that outlasted her was not wrong about that. What it was wrong about — what it has been wrong about, consistently, for more than a century — was the underlying premise of her argument.
Jarvis did not hate flowers. She wore a white carnation on the first Mother’s Day she organised. What she hated was the substitution of the gesture for the thing itself — the industrial production of a feeling, the conversion of private love into public commerce, the particular way in which a mass-produced bouquet at a marked-up price had come to stand in for the kind of attentive, personal, time-consuming love she had wanted the holiday to celebrate.
The florists who are doing the most interesting work today are not — they could not be, they are florists — in the business of abolishing the commercial holiday. What they are in the business of, at their best, is ensuring that the commerce is in service of something real. The opt-out campaign that says: we have noticed you might not be celebrating, and we care about that more than we care about your open rate. The sourcing commitment that says: the beauty of this flower has not been purchased at a cost you haven’t been told about. The staff member who says “how can I help you?” and waits to find out.
These are commercial decisions. They have commercial rationales. They are also, in their small and incremental way, an answer to Jarvis — not the one she wanted, but perhaps the one available: a flower trade that is beginning, slowly, unevenly, with considerable commercial self-interest alongside genuine human feeling, to remember that what it is selling is not flowers.
It is the meaning of flowers. And meaning, unlike a delivery fee or a promotional email, carries obligations.
The forget-me-not, again
In the first week of May, in a flower shop somewhere — London, Melbourne, Singapore, Toronto, it does not particularly matter — there are forget-me-nots in the window alongside the roses and the tulips and the peach ranunculus arranged to within an inch of its life. They weren’t there last year. They are there now because someone who works in that shop noticed, or was told, or simply knew from their own experience, that not everyone standing on the pavement outside was looking for the same thing.
It is a small thing. The holiday will proceed regardless. The emails will be sent, the carnations marked up, the promotional calendar advanced toward its peak. The industry that outlasted Anna Jarvis is not in serious danger of being transformed by a pot of forget-me-nots and a revised welcome question.
But something is changing. The opt-out campaign that began as four sentences in a Sunday email is now a parliamentary recommendation and a 100-brand movement. The sustainable sourcing directory launched with 200 listings the week before Mother’s Day in 2014 now lists nearly 700 members. The woman who founded a non-profit to send flowers to mothers of miscarriage has partnered with local florists who are donating their labour and their materials, because they believe the gesture is worth making even when no one is watching.
Jarvis wanted the holiday returned to something private and uncommodified. She was right that commerce had taken something from it. She was wrong, perhaps, about whether commerce was capable of giving anything back.
The flower in the window, in all its perishable and impractical beauty, has always been the most human kind of message: an acknowledgment, handed over without words, that the person receiving it is seen. The florists who are getting this right — slowly, commercially, imperfectly — are florists who have remembered that this is true for everyone. Including, and perhaps especially, the people the holiday has spent a century pretending do not exist.
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