Nostalgia

Hello and welcome to the latest blog from The Olivia Rose Diaries on June 16th 2023.

We recently set our alarm clock, a rare event in our lives these days as we seldom have to be anywhere by a set time, and left Olivia Rose at 7.30am to cycle to the largest flower auction in the world – Royal Flora Holland at Aalsmeer.  The self-guided tour that we would be doing cost €11 per person, whilst a more in-depth and guided tour cost €125 per person and lasted a couple of hours. The auction ran from 7am to 11am and the Royal Flora Holland website advised that we would see a greater display of flowers if we arrived earlier rather than later.

As we cycled along I found my mind wandering back to a time in my thirties when I had a flower stall in a shopping mall in Essex. I was going through a rather unsettled phase in my life at that time, or perhaps I should say more unsettled than usual, and, for some reason I can’t now recall, I had set my heart on selling flowers. This particular misguided venture didn’t last long as the market stall in the town sold their flowers for less than what I bought mine for and so I worked six long days a week and barely managed to cover my costs. Life can be a hard teacher but it taught me that the lessons you learn from failure can be as important as those you learn from success. Such clarity might be well and good with hindsight but it didn’t offer much comfort at the time.

I had my much-loved bright red Bedford Rascal van kitted out with racks and shelves so that I could safely transport my delicate produce and twice a week I would get up in the small hours and drive from my home in Hertfordshire down to London, sometimes to the flower market at Covent Garden, other times to the slightly closer one at Spitalfields, a singularly unattractive name for somewhere filled with beautiful flowers. No matter how depressing my lack of financial success, I shall never forget the magic of wandering starry-eyed through avenues of roses and lilies, daffodils and tulips, carnations and chrysanthemums, freesia and gypsophila, agonising over whether to have this, or that or, better still, both. Decisions finally made, I would load up the van and drive back up the M11 with a smile on my face and joy in my heart.

Royal Flora Holland was nothing like Covent Garden. I hardly know where to start to give you an idea of the sheer scale of the place but I’ll begin by bombarding you with figures.

They sell 46 million flowers per day. I tried to visualise that amount of flowers and failed utterly. Annually, they sell 3.3 billion roses and 1.8 billion tulips. They stock 23,000 different varieties of flowers and plants – how does anyone make a choice?! Daily turnover is €22 million – obviously they are more successful than I was. They have 2,400 customers and 5,300 suppliers from around the world and 2,700 employees. I could go on, but the statistics are overwhelming.

The entire site is massive, 1.7 million sq metres or 250 football fields and most of what we saw from the viewing galleries related only to the distribution part of the process. The vast refrigerated areas where the flowers are stored, as well as the area where they are packed ready for shipment is located on a different part of the site.

Below us on the warehouse floor were rack after rack of flowers in boxes, just their heads peaking out, and all around them was a veritable ants nest of human beings, clad in high viz jackets and driving mini-trucks with a tow hitch to and fro between the trolleys. Each employee was equipped with a headset telling them where to go, what to pick up or to drop off. As orders were fulfilled and taken away in convoys, other racks came in on automated rails to take their place.

There are 34 auctioneers working each day, some specialising in a particular flower such as roses or chrysanthemums, others trading on a broader selection. You can see from the picture below one of the auction rooms, each desk equipped with a screen and headphones.

These rooms lie empty now. During the pandemic they had to find a new way of doing business, introducing remote on-line access systems to allow trade to continue, and that has now become the norm, one more example of the many ways that Covid has changed our working lives.

It was a fascinating, awe-inspiring experience but I felt a pang of nostalgia for those long-ago days in Covent Garden. No-one was smelling the flowers down on the cavernous warehouse floor below us and the traders buying flowers for their various customers around the world, the big supermarkets amongst them, were seated in isolation in front of a screen many miles away.

I think there might have been a wholesale department buried somewhere within the complex, where small independent flower shops could arrive in person to pick up their stock. I like to imagine them loading up their vans with the same sense of pleasure that I did all those years ago.

I’ll leave you with a picture of some wildflowers we saw recently, scattered in the verges along one of the canals. Sometimes the best things in life are free.

See you next week.

MJ