Forget roses in February. Hortense Harang wants us to love flowers as they are, winter flowers in winter, spring flowers in spring, and especially those that grow in our regions. Because the figures are striking: nine out of ten flowers sold in France today are imported from Kenya, Ethiopia, Ecuador, Colombia, or overheated greenhouses in the Netherlands, produced with a lot of pesticides, insecticides, fungicides, and delivered by air.
An ultra-polluting globalized business that Hortense Harang has decided to counter, by creating a local and seasonal sector.
For fifteen years, she was a journalist, a war reporter for the BBC, and then, at the age of 37, she looked back on her career and on what has always fascinated her, horticulture, gardens, flowers , to set up his business, Fleurs d’Ici, a kind of parallel market, without stock or catalog.
Customers place orders on a theme, wedding, birth, birthday, then Hortense Harang finds the nearest florist and puts him in touch with a horticulturist in his region to create the ideal composition, only with flowers that grow during the month in question. question, and in the region of the buyer.
His model is what is called in the United States and England, the “Slow flowers” movement, the idea of promoting flowers with a minimal carbon footprint, in short circuits, cut the day before delivery, and organic. After all, if consumers are trying to eat healthier, why not apply the same principle to flowers? Since the first thing you do when you receive a bouquet is to stick your nose in it and inhale very hard, avoiding chemicals is not absurd.
When you buy flowers, there’s an 85% chance that they don’t come from France.
Meeting with François Bataillard who himself strives to cultivate without pesticides and locally.“On the front: Valentine’s Day, what are our bouquets hiding? » https://t.co/O4LrPOPznr pic.twitter.com/Pw3dJlKk8F
— france.tv (@francetv) February 7, 2022
And her concept works: in 2022, Hortense Harang celebrates the five years of her company, last year, she saw her orders jump 500%, and now plans to go further by changing the law. Last week, she launched a petition calling on presidential candidates to ban massive flower imports. His approach invites us to become curious again, to ask ourselves why do we want roses in February when they only grow from May? And above all to ask the question: what else is there? In this case, in February, heaps of varieties, of all colors: mimosa, ranunculus, wallflowers, or even violets.