At Petalon Farm, near Newquay, Florence and James Kennedy are among the growers helping to meet rising demand for locally produced flowers.
“We’re just trying to grow interesting varieties of different flowers for our bouquets, so they’re always a bit unusual and using things that you might not necessarily have heard of before,” Florence said.
The farm grows hundreds of flower varieties for bouquets sold across the UK, with crops planted throughout the year to extend the season for locally grown flowers. Some are also dried for use in winter arrangements.
“We want to be able to offer Cornish flowers for as much of the year as possible,” she added.
The number of flowers cut on the farm has grown significantly in recent years.
“We’ve sort of gone from having a couple of beds and cutting a few hundred flowers for a few weeks of the year, to, at this point in time, we’re cutting about 15,000 flowers a week,” James said.
The weather conditions of 2026 have seen fluctuating temperatures, a very wet winter and the hottest summer on record, creating difficult growing conditions for all farmers.
Cornish growers can often receive some respite from the worst of winter, James said.
“We’re quite close to the sea, but not so close that you get the salty air, so we get very few frosts. We wouldn’t typically have a hard frost in a winter here on the farm and that allows us to grow things that other people can’t.”