Grower Spotlight - Eve Clarke of Forage Flowers

I believe that if we use our joy as a compass to guide our actions, the world will be a kinder and more beautiful place. 

Eve, the founder of Forage Flowers, gives us a brightly colored, and fragrant example of how following your joy is good for the world. Doing what she loves, Eve has started a small flower farm, growing beautiful, spray free flowers in West Auckland. 

“My favorite thing is giving people flowers,” she told me. Involved in horticulture and ecology work for years, Eve found in her days as an ecologist she was most inspired by collecting native flowers and arranging them in her kitchen. Even as a kid, she knew where all the freesias grew along the beach. She loved to pick them and offer them to her neighbors and people she passed on her walks. 

Now, Eve grows as many flowers as she can in her small 250 square meter garden, using dense and succession planting methods to ensure she always has blooms on the way (while still leaving plenty for the bees!). Starting Forage Flowers was not easy - Eve was building beds and learning to arrange and sell flowers all at once with the help of her husband, Sam. She was up into the wee hours of the morning every Friday night, preparing to sell flowers at The Shed Collective, a plant based market in West Auckland, on Saturdays during her first year of business in 2020. 

Through her experience, Eve has learned some concerning things about the floral industry that demonstrate how important it is to consider where our flowers come from. She explained to me that many flowers sold in New Zealand are imported from overseas, and there is no requirement that their country of origin be printed, as there is with food. Imported flowers are fumigated to kill all bugs, and are dipped in roundup (glyphosate) before they come to the country to prevent them from growing here. She learned this when she asked a florist about buying some chrysanthemums to use to start her own from cuttings. The sad news from the florist was: it won’t work due to all the chemicals they have been treated with! 

The lack of transparency in the floral industry makes it all the more important to buy locally grown, spray free flowers. Eve is happy that flower farms are becoming more popular in Aotearoa, and that flower collectives are starting around the country. The community of flower farmers is supportive and excited to share information to help make sustainable, quality flowers available here. 

Forage Flowers is growing too. “Once it’s not your hobby anymore, it gets a bit hard,” Eve told me. All summer last year, she kept picking and picking to keep the flowers coming, and people would contact her all week to order more flowers. Happily, Forage Flowers will have some more hands when they hire their first employee soon. It is important to Eve to do everything well, and by that standard she is also committed to paying employees a living wage. 

Along with expanding their team, Eve is hoping to expand the gardens. She is looking for opportunities for land sharing in West Auckland so that Forage will have room to grow. Landsharing is beneficial for all parties involved in that growers can access land without needing to purchase it, and the person sharing the land gets to enjoy the benefits of a grower stewarding a part of their land. Eve’s gardens are a dream for pollinators and humans alike, and anyone who shares land with Forage Flowers would be very lucky. We hope Eve finds a good opportunity to landshare soon, and that this type of relationship becomes more common and accessible for new growers.  

To summarize her work as a new flower farmer, Eve reflected to me: “You bring people joy with your job. It’s not often you get to do that.” 

If you live in the Auckland area, be sure to check out Forage Flowers and treat yourself to some of the joy Eve is growing this summer. She will continue to sell flowers at The Shed Collective, doing bouquet orders for special occasions and birthdays, and she is hoping to have a roadside stall up and running at the farm soon. You can see the latest from Forage Flowers on their Instagram or Facebook.

Written by Naomi Morgan
Photos by Eve Clarke

Summer Editorial – Land Use

Has the Covid-19 Pandemic ‘Sped Up’ Progress in Sustainable Agriculture? 

One of the main narratives that came after lockdown last year, was a grassroots push to ‘build back better’. Central Government took this on and pumped funding into green initiatives to boost the green economy. This is fantastic in New Zealand, however globally, it is hard to tell whether the pandemic has upped the pace of change, or whether it is being way-laid like other work since Covid-19 took the world by a storm. Also, does this apply to sustainable initiatives broadly, or has land use and agriculture has been a particular target.

To look into this more, we may be able to assess progress by looking at global commitments and Summits. Has sustainable agriculture been discussed as part of the solution since Covid highlighted food insecurity and inequity? 

This year, the UN Food Summit was held in New York in September. The UN’s Food Summit was a little low key in the media this year, it may have been a bit shadowed by the lead up to COP26 in Glasgow. By looking at the UN Food Summit, we may be able to assess whether work in this area is being accelerated in light of Covid-19, or whether it has been slowed due to the disruption. 

An impressive engagement process with stakeholders around the world was undertaken over the 18 months in advance, gathering ideas and research in order to inform solutions being created at the Summit. Given the work achieved in this engagement process, I would say Covid-19 has not significantly slowed down engagement work in this area. 

The Summit also focussed on ‘Prosperity’ as one of the three core areas for the Summit, identifying that agriculture has the potential to play a significant role in recovering from the pandemic, and the inequality in our food system that the pandemic has highlighted. Have a look at this page to find out more about how the UN Food Summit process was run for 2021. This also indicates that globally, Covid-19 has emphasised the need for action on the food system front.

• Prosperity, “Leading an inclusive and equitable recovery from COVID-19”: While representing a tenth of the global economy and supporting the livelihoods of over one billion people, food systems are a focus of inequality. They also hold the potential to be a powerful driver for the recovery. We need to double-down on our determination to ensure that all human beings can enjoy their fundamental human rights and prosperous and fulfilling lives and that economic, social, and technological progress occurs in harmony with nature.

To those engaged in the process, and in light of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the vision of the 2030 Agenda is as relevant as ever. The urgency even greater.

Thirdly, the Summit identified ‘Action Tracks’ to be implemented following the Summit. Action Track 5, ‘Build Resilience to Vulnerabilities, Shocks and Stress’ specifically relates to action needed to respond to Covid 19 and prepare our food system for shocks such as pandemics. The Action Tracks also identified the need to address barriers to smallholder farmers and small-scale enterprises along the food value chain to improve environmental and social outcomes.

For these three reasons, I would say the Covid-19 global pandemic has not slowed down action in improving the current food system, or taken away from it, but rather highlighted the need to be urgent about changing it. 

However, identifying the need for the change to our food system in the Summit does not necessarily indicate real change on the ground. What were the solutions suggested? Does it include land sharing to address inequity in access to land-use? Land ownership has strongly been linked with wealth and power over history. How do we make sharing a more significant part of our economy so that we can redistribute resources and resolve inequity in land access? These days, sharing seems to be all about social media. How do we make sharing more normal in day-to-day life? This is where Village Agrarians come in. Start small, in our own region, by pairing those who would like to share their land, with those who are looking for land access. This feels like a huge win, so simple but not very commonly done. 

The UN Food Summit pulled together a long list of problems and actions. There are about 2,000 actions alone! And yes, land access has been identified as an issue causing inequity in our food system. The proposed solution is to improve local and domestic procurement processes to support local producers, and to enhance private-public partnerships to mobilise local finance to improve equity. When wanting to look further into the solution for improving land access and tenure, Solution 44: ‘Improve security of land tenure, land banking & community-based mechanisms on land rights & control over resources’, the sheet came up blank. If only Village Agrarians had been there, we would have loved to work this out with them, perhaps the work on this is still coming. 😊 You can explore the issues and solutions explored in the Summit on this page. 

Even if the solution has not quite been ironed out and put in place, it is heartening to know that it has been highlighted on a global platform as an issue that must be addressed, even in a global pandemic crisis, making it even more important to resolve.

Good News Story for Land Use -  A Grass Roots Victory

It’s always good to share great news. Australia has been heavy on the mining, but recently, a proposed mine was rejected in favour of protecting horticultural land. Kalbar Operations proposed an open cut mineral sands mine which would have had a footprint of 16.75 Km2. It would have operated for 8-15 years, and caused irreversible damage to a horticultural sector. The mine was proposed for an area in Eastern Gippsland which produces food for Victoria and New South Wales, known as one of Victoria’s most prosperous food bowls. 

A passionate grassroots group wrote submissions, banding together to fight the mining proposal, and won!

This may just be the turning of a tide. Rather than valuing an extracting, linear economy, government planning may just be changing to value long term land use, and seeing the benefits of horticulture in society.