Handily Mother's Day was just around the corner and I thought I would send my Mother a nice bunch of flowers (Fairtrade of course).

I found a lovely bunch from ethicalsuperstore.com and was about to click buy when all the things that I had written about flowers in the past came flooding through my mind.

"I can't do it" I said to my husband as I tried to buy them "It doesn't matter how pretty they look or that they're Fairtrade, I know their environmental impact and buying them would make me a big hypocrite".

I decided to give myself the rest of the day to mull it over.
That afternoon I went to Tesco, "Now what is an environmental campaigner doing in a supermarket"? I can hear you ask. I wasn't in there shopping I'll have you know.
My son has just started a club called Explore Learning which happens to based there.
Whilst he is doing his thing, my daughter and I usually go and have a cup of tea.

The walk to the upstairs café took us past a Day-Glo array of flowers for Mother's day. The colours illuminating from the impossibly low-priced bouquets were so bright and unnatural looking it was as if they belonged to the Wizard of Oz film set.

Most parents will back me up when I say that there is no accounting for taste when it comes to children. For some unknown reason under 10's seem attracted to the most hideous, fake, tacky and colourful of items.

And so it was with these flowers. I tried to walk very quickly past the bouquets, diverting my daughters attention by pretending I had seen one of her friends from school in the opposite direction.
All to no avail I'm afraid as I heard the inevitable "Please can I buy some flowers for you Mummy"?
Apart from the fact that it meant having to buy my own present, which is par for the course with young children, I decidedly instantly that there was no way I wanted a bunch of these flowers.

A normal mother, a calm mother would have said "No my dear, lovely, sweet, thoughtful child, we shall not buy these flowers as there are some much prettier ones in our garden which are almost as pretty as you and you can pick those".

As I am neither of those things (although it is my aim in life to be so) the very loud conversation went something like this:

Me: No

Daughter: Why not? They are so pretty. Please I want to buy you a present for Mother's day

Me: Because they have been grown abroad by people being paid almost nothing, sprayed with chemicals, have been fed with dyed water looking at the colour of them and to top it all have then been flown over.
These flowers are more fake than Jordan and would be the absolute last thing I would want on Mother's day.

A man next to me, who had obviously been thinking about buying some, glanced at me very nervously and quickly returned his bunch of flowers to the pile.

Gosh, did I really look that angry?

Two thoughts immediately occurred to me, firstly I knew that I had made my mind up about my Mother's present and secondly I felt like an absolute witch to my daughter.
All she had wanted to do was something nice for me and now I had upset her.

"I'm sorry" I told her as I looked at her indignant little face and then said the nice calm and normal mother thing that I should have just said in the first place.

This cheered her up no end and as you can see from my photo, she did pick me some beautiful daffodils that we grew ourselves.
As for my mother, I went threes-up with my sisters on a beauty treatment for her, which she loved as she would not think to go and get this for herself.

Don't get me wrong, I do really love flowers and I think that they look wonderful.
I just prefer natural ones that have been grown somewhere in the vicinity which makes me think that someone might be missing a trick here.
If I knew I could buy bouquets of local flowers then I would. Does anyone know of such a service or company?
I'd be interested to know your thoughts.