As it turns out, it also presents one of the best opportunities to shift your spending to greener goods. Of the billions of dollars spent on Valentine’s Day gifts every year, more than a third are spent on flowers.  As beautiful as they may be, conventionally-grown cut flowers are usually doused with toxic pesticides that are damaging to people as well as the environment.

Don’t miss this important article on the toxic impacts most flowers have on people and the planet.

Solution?

• Go organic. If you’re planning to give a bouquet of classic red roses, order organically grown flowers to avoid growing systems that use toxic chemicals.  Plenty of businesses, like Organic Bouquet, offer organic roses as well as their conventional assortment.

• Choose flowers and greens grown locally. Your gift will leave a smaller carbon footprint than a bouquet that was flown in from South America or another tropical clime.  Visit Local Harvest to locate the flower grower nearest to you.

• Forage your own blooms.  Spend your money on a reusable vase rather than throwaway flowers, then fill it with holly branches, red twig dogwood, pine boughs, dried hydrangea blooms, cattails, or whatever else you can find in your yard. Garnish with a re-usable red ribbon.

• Give a potted plant instead of cut flowers.  The live plant acts as a mini carbon sink, and will last longer longer than any cut bouquet. Focus on plants that are particularly good at purifying indoor air, like Chinese evergreens, spider plants, and peace lilies.

• Make a basket.  Stock a garden basket with an assortment of flower seeds, a trowel, some gardening gloves, and maybe a new pair of clippers. In the spring, help your beloved sow the seeds, then enjoy the blooms all summer long.

• Dish up some bulbs. Fill a shallow bowl with small pebbles; place five or six narcissus bulbs on top. The bulbs will begin to grow as soon as they’re watered; in six weeks, they’ll have sprouted beautiful foliage and fragrant blooms that keep Valentine’s Day alive long past Feb. 14.

Where’s the chocolate, you ask?  Right here!

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