Export bulbs and a bike packing flower adventure

Much like Narcissus, a hunter in Greek mythology who fell in love with a reflection of himself, I too am on the hunt. I, however, look in the rear view mirror of our Skoda and reflect on how the 5am start has done me little to no favours. I certainly won’t be beating my own breast so hard it turns purple due to the knowledge I cannot, in fact, be in a relationship with myself. Poor Narcissus.

Narcissus, the species name for daffodils of many devastatingly beautiful varieties, are the UK’s largest cut flower export. In early spring when their heads begin to emerge, or their custardy, marshmallow-like scent is warmed in the sunlight, it feels as though spring really has burst through that hard crust of winter.

The season is almost over to see these beauties flowering but due to a nasty incident on a bikepacking trip the week prior, between me and a cattle grid (we won’t name names), I’ve had to delay my trip a little.

I wait in a car park in Blairgowrie, having driven 4 hours to meet Ally, Commercial Director at Grampian Growers. Grampian Growers is a co-operative of bulb, potato and cut flower producers, and they produced 8 million bunches of daffodils this year. Their average cut flower season is 4-8 weeks depending on the weather, and they grow varieties with names like Golden Ducket, Dutch Master, Carlton and Winston Churchill.

Whilst I set out to explore the cut flower aspects of this business, it turns out they really are an added bonus for the farmers growing them, and that the financial heft is in the bulbs. In the height of the bulb lifting season which hits around June, farmers are lifting 100 tonnes of bulbs a week for processing.

The bulbs are then sent to the Grampian growers main facility to be cleaned, steamed and packaged up for sale to retail customers like Lidl, Homebase, and Boston Seeds. In Scotland the weather is impacting the growing, and the lifting process, but it’s much worse in Cornwall and the South coast where most of the narcissi production is taking place in the UK. Warmer weather brings pest and disease (how biblical), and impacts the bulb, not to mention that the warmer soils are not good for the bulbs either.

The cut flowers - almost all the non-specialist narcissi - grown by approximately half of the growers in the Grampian Growers Co-operative are sent to the UK market, retailers like Lidl, Morrisons and M&S snap them up and sell them in their shops across the four countries. If you bought daffs from either of those retail chains and they’ve got the British label on them, they might just have been grown by one of the Grampian growers.

Grampian are a fantastic farmer-led business, and they’re thinking ahead to what other bulbs might be good for production in the future, what’s possible, and what can be trialled. This kind of work is critical for a resilient business that is able to adapt to climate change. Diversity in your growing system means you’re not completely reliant on a single crop, which in the event of a set of erratic weather events that might damage that crop, wipe it out with pests or disease, or simply be too warm in the soil for it to thrive, is particularly important.

My big takeaway from this conversation with Ally, and with others like Claire at Grampian who also runs Flowers Grown in Scotland, and Cel at Forever Green Flower Company, is the distinct lack of data on growers in this industry. There isn’t enough data let alone joined up data to understand even the size, shape and scope of the industry, let alone the key issues that are facing them.

It is this big question mark that sets the backdrop for my bikepacking flower adventure that rolls around mere days later as I pushed my bike across the gangway and onto the ferry at North Tyneside Docks.

The overnight ferry from Newcastle to the closest port to Amsterdam is about 4 times the price of a flight (we love being taxed for making more climate friendly decisions!), but is without a doubt the more fun option.

On Monday morning, after an easy crossing through the North Sea, myself and a host of 7 other bikepackers (all men) disembarked and begun our cycle to Amsterdam.

As any good adventure goes, I got a flat tyre within 5km. Which meant many stops on the side of the beautiful winding cycleway to hand pump up my tyre every few kilometres. When I finally made it to Amsterdam 30km later, with a huge sigh of relief I dropped my bike off at a bike shop and while I waited for her repair, took myself to the tulip museum.

Tulips are synonymous with The Netherlands. Once again, time meant that I was unable to get out here during the few weeks where the tulip fields were in full bloom, but the museum was enough for me.

You should absolutely go and visit the Tulip museum if you’re in Amsterdam, it takes less than an hour and is only €5 for adult entry, but it speaks to the magpie-like obsession of humans for collecting strange and beautiful things - and then monetising them.

Many tulips come from across Central Asia, from mountains like the Pamir mountain range in Tajikistan. These bulbs were, overtime, commodified as part of the silk trade route and the Sultans in Istanbul were so fond of them that they would have entire parties decorated with them to show them off. Tulip motifs can be seen woven into textiles and kiln fired into tiles and ceramics across Central Asia, Turkey, the Caucasus and the Middle East.

The Dutch found their own tulip based frenzy in the 17th century, when the price of bulbs rose and rose to the point where a single rare bulb would cost the same as a town house in Amsterdam. This golden era of madness and tulips led to a huge collapse, but in the 1800s steady horticultural production of bulbs began in earnest and in the 21st century, The Netherlands is a hub of floral activity.

Activity which were going to explore, by bike, over the next week or so. First up, the largest international floral market in the world…