The Q&A: Ben Cross, the cut flower grower single-handedly taking on Big Flora

I talk to the fourth generation grower about the plight of the domestic flower trade, the questionable ethics of floral imports, and what happens to all those wonky stems

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Ben Cross inside one of the many alstroemeria greenhouses at Crosslands Flower Nursery

I can’t remember the last time I bought cut flowers. For years now, long before I took an active interest in gardening, my relationship with pre-snipped stems has been fraught, to say the least.

There’s no denying the beauty of the blooms themselves – they look gorgeous in the garden, it makes perfect sense to want to admire their colour, form and scent inside the home too. No, my objection was not an aesthetic one, but a matter of principle.

Here in the UK, 90% of all cut flowers – be they bought at the supermarket, through your local florist, or an online delivery service – are imported. The vast majority arrive on our shores from the Netherlands, which for the longest time has been the centre of a global annual flower trade worth an estimated £10.6bn ($12.2bn).

But few of these flowers that end up in a vase on your shelf are even grown in the Netherlands. Most stem from nearer the Equator – Colombia, Kenya, Ecuador and Ethiopia are some of the largest exporters – and are flown around the globe, giving an average Valentine’s Day bouquet, summery bunch of sunflowers or “seasonal” supermarket selection a carbon footprint so astronomically enormous that I have always found it to be entirely unjustifiable.

Like I say, though, I don’t have an issue with the concept of cut flowers. I just wish that, in the same way that I can buy seasonal, locally grown fruit and veg via an organic box scheme, I could get my hands on a bunch of flowers that haven’t spent five weeks travelling halfway around the world in a series of refrigerated containers. 

Enter Ben Cross. Ben is a fourth generation grower at Crosslands Flower Nursery, a family-run alstroemeria specialist in West Sussex. Since his great grandparents sowed their first seeds back in the 1930s, Crosslands has gone from being one of dozens of small market gardens in the Sidlesham area alone, to one of only a handful of commercial flower growers in the whole of Britain.

Which is why in 2014, Ben (who has been lazily described as the Jamie Oliver of flower-growing, owing I’m guessing to his surfy attire and boyish charm) launched the British Flowers Rock campaign. As I found out when I caught up with Ben last week, he wants to raise consumer awareness for “home grown not flown” blooms, and the precarious position in which the remaining cut flower growers in the UK find themselves in today. 

I spoke to an enthusiastic and energetic Ben over Zoom, as he prepared for the autumn alstroemeria harvest, one of the busiest times in the Crosslands calendar. We spoke about the history of British flower growing, the supermarket’s stifling squeeze over the domestic flower trade, and the art and science of sustainable alstroemeria growing. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Crosslands nursery has been in your family for four generations. Did you always know you’d take over one day?

From a very young age, I knew I wanted to help the environment. Even when I was about five years old, so in the mid-80s, I already knew I didn’t want a normal 9 til 5. Later, people were studying accounts and business studies and all that baloney, but I just wanted to be outside all the time, because I grew up in the country, outside.

I liked water sports, surfing, scuba diving, all that stuff, so I did marine biology for over 10 years, from 2000 to 2011. I studied, I worked, I lived around the world, but then I felt the lure to come back to Crosslands. 

What was behind that lure?

I was born here. We’re five minutes from the beach to the south, and five minutes north is the South Downs National Park, so we’re in a nice little area.

In Sussex, there used to be a lot of large-scale flower farms, flower growers, flower nurseries, and obviously it’s a small world, so my parents and uncles and aunties were friends with all these people. But around that time, they were selling their greenhouses for [the land to become] houses and it was all getting a bit horrible. I didn’t want that to happen to Crosslands. So in 2011 I came back, and then from about 2014 fully took it on.

An alstroemeria bloom – a rare sight inside the Crosslands greenhouse, as stems are normally cut before the flowers have opened

Can you tell me a bit about the history of Crosslands, and how it came to be? 

Crosslands started in 1936 as part of a Land Settlement Association scheme. So in the 1930s, there was high unemployment, and a lot of shipbuilders and miners were out of work. What the government did back then was to set up these growing communities, where people would work, farm the land, and that’s how they would live.

My great grandparents were one of the original families that were part of the Land Settlement Association scheme. Sidlesham down here was the largest settlement: there were 150 market gardens set up. My family had one of these market gardens, and they grew a really diverse range of crops – salad crops, vegetables, flowers, a menagerie of farm animals – and so did their next-door neighbours, and so on. The lorries would go up and down the lanes of Sidlesham, collect all this home grown produce, and that would get taken to Spitalfields, Covent Garden, and even markets in Birmingham and Manchester and so on.

That sounds so lovely. I know it’s not like that anymore. What happened?

Then there was the birth of the supermarkets, and all this cheap imported stuff coming in in high volume. And back then we didn’t have your Jamie Olivers and your Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstalls to educate the public, so people were just buying all this cheap food and this cheap produce because it was available all year round very cheaply.

No longer could you grow lots of different things on your market garden and make a living, because supermarkets were just killing you. They didn’t want any of your product anymore because they could get it dirt cheap from Kenya, Colombia, Cambodia or wherever. So it was time to specialise, and after trialling a few things, my grandad, who took over from my great grandparents, got on very well with British alstroemerias. Slowly but surely the whole nursery came over to growing alstroemerias.

And how does the nursery today compare to the one you grew up on?

I mean, infrastructure-wise, it’s still the 1936 shed, similar greenhouses, but obviously the modern world has changed. 

Grandad used to get £1.95 a bunch at Covent Garden Flower Market; now we don’t send to Covent Garden because we’d get 50p a bunch. We used to just supply wholesalers and supermarkets, but that’s unsustainable, because wholesalers and supermarkets just want the inferior imported products. So what we do now is sell direct to the public, to florists, cafes, restaurants, farm shops… basically anyone that cares about Planet Earth and sustainability and where their stuff is coming from. So that side of things has changed.

Also, sustainability-wise, we’ve now got solar panels, we’ve got air source heat pumps, and we’ve got biomass, where we use locally sourced wood to heat the greenhouses, instead of using oil – which grandad would use to heat the greenhouses, and which he bought for 10 old pence a gallon. That's less than a penny a litre. It’s much more sustainable now. 

The actual getting your hands dirty and growing hasn’t changed very much, but as with all UK farmers and growers, we have to be nimble, agile, resilient, and find other ways to survive. 

Stems are snipped to a uniform length

By the time you got involved as an adult, Crosslands nursery was well-established as an alstroemeria specialist. Do you have much passion for those plants in particular? Or is it purely business, for you?

Oh no, I’m rubbish at the business side! I just like the growing and getting in the greenhouse. Obviously I have to do everything: the Xero accounts, the social media, the marketing, because we can’t afford to outsource all this stuff. I only sleep four hours a day!

Also, you’ve got to bear in mind, with alstroemeria, we do over 70 varieties, which is like growing over 70 different types of plants. It’s not as easy as putting all the different colours in the ground and they all behave the same – that would be boring.

But what is quite good, and keeps me busy, is that some like the summer, some like the winter, and let’s say you have one variety in Greenhouse A and then put the same variety in Greenhouse B, two different greenhouses, different thickness of glass, different soil science, different climate, they’ll behave completely differently. So there’s more than enough to keep me busy and interested. I have heard, “alstroemerias, is that all you do?” But we do a lot of different varieties and that keeps it spiced up. 

Alstroemeria are beautiful and understandably popular as a garden plant, and so readers may be familiar with growing them at home. How does the nature of commercial growing differ from tending to these plants on a domestic scale?

First of all, we don’t grow your ‘Indian Summer’, your ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’, your garden-type varieties that you see in Wisley and all of that. We grow the commercial varieties of alstroemeria – very specialist varieties, very expensive varieties, and alstroemeria that shouldn’t be taken for granted. They’re bred for their vase life, their flower size, their height, their colour, all sorts of things. 

So we’re factoring in all this other stuff that general gardeners wouldn’t factor in. They’d just go: “Oh that looks nice, we’ll shove it there”, whereas we’re more looking at how many stems are we going to get per square metre over an annual cycle. And we’re looking at in-depth stuff like levels of sodium, boron, zinc, copper, pH levels. It’s an art and a science to do what we do on a large scale, with not many people and not much technology.

How many stems do you produce each year?

Oh, we produce millions of stems through the course of the year, especially in spring and autumn when alstroemeria are in their pomp and naturally at their best. Even though alstroemeria are classed as an A1R – an all-year-round crop – we’re really in-season in spring and autumn, because that’s naturally when the soil temperature, the air temperature, everything’s perfect for them to go rampant.

It’s too hot in the summer. The roots and rhizomes go dormant, so actually you’d harvest more than they can reproduce. And we grow our crop very naturally, we don’t use any artificial lighting, so we don’t harvest much in the winter. But in spring and autumn, we’re harvesting tens of thousands of stems a day. 

Alstroemeria has its origins in South America, but have you found it to be particularly well suited to being grown in Britain?

It’s a cool crop, in that it doesn’t take a lot of heat. And it’s a dry crop, in that it doesn’t take a lot of water. We only water 20 minutes once a month in the winter, 20 minutes once every two weeks in the spring or autumn, and 20 minutes once every 10 days in the summer. And a lot of our plants are 20, 30 years old, still producing good saleable stems, so we don’t even have to replant very much either. I don’t grow flowers from seeds or bulbs, I’m growing from a root-based system, so it’s a nice and sustainable crop to grow. 

And I believe you’re peat- and pesticide-free, is that right?

We use about 20 tons of organic compost every winter, and we’re now peat free. All of our packaging is recyclable, all of the heating is sustainable. And we don’t use any pesticides or insecticides. We use partner planting, companion planting, growing things alongside other things to control pests naturally. So we grow aubergine plants, tomato plants, courgette and cucumber plants within the greenhouses, and we use those as traps for things like white fly, which are naturally attracted off the alstroemeria crop and onto the tomato crop. 

Ben preparing bunches for delivery

You launched the British Flowers Rock campaign back in 2014 – can you explain what that campaign is all about, and why you feel that it needs to exist?

The main fact everyone needs to know when reading this is that over 90% of flowers in the UK are imported. And when we talk about that percentage, we’re not talking just about supermarkets. You’ve got supermarkets; wholesalers; letterbox delivery companies; big online florists; and you’ve got your petrol station flowers. Farm shops import flowers. Florists import flowers. Even when you’re out and about, you might go to your local restaurant – they might have a locally sourced food menu, but where’s that flower come from that’s on the table? 

As with locally grown food, it makes so much sense for so many different reasons to buy British-grown flowers here in Britain – but I take it you haven’t found industry or government to be as sympathetic to your cause…

I tried to get help. I tried to collaborate with the National Farmers’ Union, the NFU; I tried to get through to DEFRA; I spoke to my local MP; tried to get onto Gardeners’ World; local radio stations; Countryfile. But no-one seemed to care. No-one ever got back to me. And after a few years I just got fed up. So I thought, well, if no-one’s going to help me then I’ll just do it myself, and I created the British Flowers Rock campaign in 2014. 

Now I do about 50, 60 talks a year, to RHS clubs, WIs, flower clubs, podcasts, and people like you who understand what I’m trying to do. I just do my little bit to make people aware. Until someone helps me with it, I’ll just keep annoying people by doing it, and getting under people’s skin. I’m booked up for 2023 already, so hopefully if I get a booking for 2024 it’ll be 10 years of campaigning. 

Are all the flowers that are being imported, that make up the bulk of cut-flower sales here in the UK, varieties that could be grown here, but aren’t due to market forces?

Yeah. For example, there used to be hundreds of acres of alstroemeria grown in the UK. Even around here there were three large growers like me growing it, and they’ve gone out of business because a supermarket has phoned them up and said: “We can get it 4p cheaper a bunch from Colombia.” But you go to that supermarket’s Twitter page and they’ll say “carbon neutral by 2030”. Again, it’s a load of old baloney. If something’s 0.01p cheaper over in Ecuador, they’ll go over there. So it can be grown here, it can be grown sustainably here, but if it’s purely down to nought-something pence per stem, they’ll go elsewhere. It’s not that it couldn’t be grown, it’s just purely down to people making money and not caring about the planet.

I’m sure if the public were better educated, then they would be happy to pay 0.01p more. And actually, my flowers are cheaper than the imported stuff, because instead of going through about five different middlemen, you get it direct, so it actually works out a lot cheaper than going into Sainsbury's. My bunches work out about £2.50 a bunch, whereas they’re £3.50 in Sainsbury's, and they’re 5 weeks old. It’s all about that awareness.

The end product: freshly cut alstroemerias sitting pretty in a vase

I remember going to a wholesale plant nursery not that long ago – they grow some of their own plants but still rely heavily on imports from Europe, from places like Holland, and they were explaining that it’s becoming more complicated and more expensive after Brexit…

They say it comes from Holland, but remember that even the Dutch are going out of business. So Holland is where all the big flower markets are, and yeah, everything comes from Holland, but what’s coming to us from Holland has often actually come from Ecuador, Cambodia, Kenya, before it even goes to Holland. That’s why it takes five weeks for it to get from grower to consumer.

And that’s another thing to factor in: that half the carbon footprint generated by imported perishable products like vegetables and flowers, is a waste, because it’s just empty planes and boats going back, because we don’t export anything those countries want.

But I was wondering whether that might actually be a good thing for you: if imports become impractical, then maybe supermarkets and wholesalers will turn back to British growers.

Yeah but we had this before. Do you remember the [Eyjafjallajökull] ash cloud? Panic. Brexit? Panic. Covid? Panic. The war in Ukraine now? Panic. It’s all knee-jerk reactions. Yeah, there is a bit more demand, but nothing to fill that demand because, even for me, to put up another half acre is about half a million pounds. That’s before you’ve even put in your plant material, your staff and all that. 

To meet that, I’m going to need investment from the government, which is what they used to do, hence the LSA – that was all government funded. And that’s what happens in Holland and a lot of other countries. So until the NFU, DEFRA and our government look at this seriously, which I don’t think they ever will in my lifetime, then nothing unfortunately is going to change. Which is a real shame.

In a recent Instagram video you made a comparison between wonky veg that is discarded because it’s deemed to fall short of supermarket standards, and the flower stems that don’t meet their own specific set of requirements. That wasn’t something that I was aware of. Can you explain?

Do you remember the family on that Hugh Fearnley TV show, that cried and went out of business because their parsnips were a little bit bent, a little bit wonky? The country got behind them. 

Well, it’s not just the food industry. At Crosslands we have to discard tens of thousands of stems a year because they’re not the right height, they’re not the right weight, they’re a little bit kinked, gnarly or wonky – though we do sell wonky stems in our posey bunches, through the British Flowers Rock campaign. 

The flower and plant industry is worth £2.2 billion within the UK, and we never get mentioned in the “War on Waste”. For example, Sainsbury’s have got the Imperfect range, Morrison’s have got Wonky Veg, but they won’t have wonky or imperfect flowers. Why not? We put as much energy, love, passion and resource into those, it’s just, that’s the way they’ve grown.

So what can a reader or a consumer do to support the domestic flower industry? 

The worst thing you can do is go to a supermarket, even if you see the British logo on the packaging. Take daffodils for example. They were £1.99, now they’re 95p. Do you think the grower is loving the fact that you’re buying his daffodils for cheaper in 2022/2023, when his costs have gone up just like your energy costs have gone up? No. 

So the best thing to do is hunt down people like me who supply direct. You get better information, you get better customer service, you get fresher, better product, and you get it cheaper. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many of us left.

For more information on Crosslands Flower Nursery, check them out on Facebook. You can also follow Ben on Instagram and Twitter. 

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Are you a lover of cut flowers? Perhaps you grow your own. Ever tried alstroemeria? Leave a comment and share some of your favourites with the Earthworm community!