Bloom and bust: From violet smuggling to lovesick GIs, the colourful history of our flower trade...

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flower stalls at Covent Garden market circa 1905

flower stalls at Covent Garden market circa 1905

People would draw up in their carriages to inhale the scent of violets wafting along the seafront, as porters loaded the ‘flower train’ that brought Devon violets from Dawlish to London Paddington and thence to Covent Garden.

From the 1890s, nosegays of violets – selling for only a ha’penny locally – fetched premium prices in London and were Mothering Sunday favourites.

Some 200 acres around Dawlish were planted with violets – even the smallest growers could send a couple of boxes to the capital.

But World War II hit violet growers hard. Prices rocketed as land was requisitioned and transport restrictions on non-essential goods meant that violets became scarce.

Resourceful Devonians resorted to violet smuggling, explains Russell Clark, curator of the first exhibition to tell the story of the cut flower trade, being held at London’s Garden Museum.

‘On one occasion a hearse arrived at the station with a coffin booked onto the London train. Officials became suspicious because the wreaths had violets at their base, instead of the customary moss and fern. A dozen bunches of violets sold in Cornwall for 4s (20p), but in Covent Garden they’d fetch 24s. Detectives opened the coffin and discovered it was crammed with flowers.’

But one part of the flower trade was thriving, as American soldiers and airmen wired orders for flowers to their sweethearts with such abandon the authorities became concerned that the location of US service bases could become known to the enemy.


So GIs’ orders had to be taken by WVS ladies in the NAAFI, to be processed centrally in Dundee and Salisbury... Careless bouquets, it seemed, could cost lives.

As for florists, it wasn’t until the 1870s that the word florist came to mean a person who sells cut flowers.

Originally, florists were plantsmen, specialising in five species only for the beauty of their flowers: carnations, tulips, anemones, ranunculus and auriculae; then, from 1750, hyacinths and polyanthus and, later, pinks. But from the early 19th century, the list of florists’ flowers expanded.

Of the 270,000 flower species that exist worldwide today, 125,000 have been developed over the past 150 years – and fashions in flowers have changed.

Those tiny posies of violets, sold by Eliza Doolittle outside Covent Garden for gentlemen’s buttonholes or to pin onto a coat, were also popular as gifts. But their popularity never really recovered after the war.

The first air-freighted flowers were imported to the UK in the 1950s and today – despite having one of the best climates for growing flowers in the world – we import nearly 90 per cent of our cut flowers from Kenya, the Netherlands and Colombia.

Cheap and cheerful… but not nearly as charming as a modest bunch of English violets.

Floriculture: Flowers, Love And Money, Garden Museum, London SE1, until 28 April. www.garden museum.org.uk

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