My husband and I regularly discuss climate change. “It doesn’t matter whether you fly within Europe or take the train,” he claims, “through certificate trading, all airlines have long since determined how much CO₂ they emit annually.” nonsense! You get mold on the house and after 15 years the stuff falls off the wall and has to be disposed of as hazardous waste.”
It doesn’t matter which ecological topic we bring to the table – we rarely come to an agreement. We debate the most economical dishwasher program, the ski circus in the Alps, the sense of speed limits, green investments, the ecological footprint of Amazon packages and the CO₂ emissions in the production of organic sweet cream butter compared to conventional butter.
My husband is not an ignorant downplayer of climate change, for heaven’s sake, no. As a rationally ticking mathematician, he simply considers my attempts to reduce CO₂ emissions through trivial everyday measures to be of little use. “It’s all useless,” he says. “The climate change must be politically controlled.”
Climate change: What can each of us do?
I don’t want to believe that. Waiting for business and politics to initiate an ecological transformation process that turns things around seems naïve to me. And the question of what each one of us can do drives me more and more. It needs “people who no longer wait for the system to change at some point, but who tackle it now and do their part to make this system change more likely,” wrote Maike Sippel, Professor of Sustainable Economics at Konstanz University of Applied Sciences, recently in the taz.
Well, my cervical vertebra doesn’t bother me being stuck on runways, joining a green party contradicts my journalistic compass (in my opinion journalists have no place in a party) and the dishwasher’s eco-program is obviously too thin (see above). So what can I contribute that makes sense? Maybe at this point write down a green lighthouse topic every now and then, a story about people who make the world a little bit better with their actions. Would that be okay? Fine.
Then I’ll tell you about Sonia Grimm here today. Sonia is in her early 30s, a third-generation cut flower producer, and about ten years ago she took over her parents’ gardening business in Sinzheim, a small town near Baden-Baden. For 40 years the company specialized in growing roses. The cut roses grew in monoculture in heated greenhouses and several times a year the harvest was sold wholesale to the highest bidder. A good deal, after all, long-stemmed cut roses aren’t just for Valentine’s Day.
Unfortunately, as we gardeners know, of course, roses are not easy: lice, mildew, rust and all sorts of other fungal diseases can severely damage a plant within a few weeks. And when, as in the Grimm nursery, the bushes are densely packed in a greenhouse, the weeks sometimes turn into days. Without the use of chemical sprays, nothing works in the conventional rose industry. “Cut roses are a cumbersome culture,” Sonia explained to me when I visited her in Baden-Baden with my camera crew about a year ago. “They have to flower four times a year. If you don’t fight the pests properly, you spread the diseases.”
Nasty and ugly: The rose dew fungus is a heavy burden on roses.imago
When Sonia was a child she loved to roam around the huge greenhouses and play hide and seek. However, she was regularly banned from entering. Namely, when her father squeezed into a white protective suit and went through the rows with a respirator to spray poisonous mist. “After that, nobody could go in there for days,” she said.
Even then, lethal injections really went against the grain of Sonia’s father and he looked for ways to produce his goods differently. But – it was too early. “My father even did an internship at a Demeter farm in the early 1990s. But the transition here was difficult. He could not really convince either his employees or his customers. Everyone was afraid it would go wrong.”
While organic production methods became common in the meat industry and agriculture, the horticultural industry continued as before. The consultant from pest control, who regularly stopped by Grimm’s company, did not have a single ecologically harmless product in his tool case. Flower production without insecticides simply did not exist. And in many companies, unfortunately, this is still the case today.
When Sonia decided to join her parents’ company around ten years ago, she was certain: “It has to work without insecticides.” Together with her father, she and her father gradually said goodbye to the monoculture. The two tried: Which flowers grow regionally? Which are less susceptible to pests? Does the seed only germinate in spring and summer or are there plants that can also be sown in autumn? What should the soil in the greenhouses be like? Can the flowers make it through the winter without heating? All questions that probably no cut flower business in Germany had ever dealt with back then, in 2013.
“Everyone laughed at us,” the young gardener told me, “and in fact a lot of things went down the drain at first.” The company lost more than 50 percent of its sales in the first five years. Either the seeds didn’t sprout at all or the frost moved into the greenhouses in winter and destroyed the harvest. In addition, the expensive, regionally produced flowers found it difficult to keep up with the cheap goods from abroad. After all, Germany alone imports 1.5 billion roses annually, most of them from Kenya. They are offered in stores at an average price of just one euro.
But almost all other varieties that we consumers buy from florists are cheaply produced and have traveled far. Gerberas come from South Africa, lilies from California, orchids from Thailand and tulips from the Netherlands. All of these cut flowers are grown using sprays and imported to Germany with complex logistics. They may look beautiful in a bouquet, but they are not sustainable.
Regional and sustainable: 120 types of flowers distributed throughout the year
Despite all opposition, Sonia and her parents stuck to the reorientation of the company. “Sticking with something is always easier,” Sonia said. “But I always believed that it would work.” Today they did it. In their company, Sonia and her father now harvest more than 120 types of flowers throughout the year. Now in February it’s the Levkojen. Then come the tulips, snapdragons, buttercups, sunflowers, haretails, scabious and many more.
The cut flowers thrive exclusively with organic fertilizers, are kept pest-free through the targeted use of beneficial insects and, with the exception of the tulips, grow without heating. The company has made itself largely independent of rising energy prices. Floralita, as the company is now called, has been organically certified for three years. Sonia is proud of that.
It doesn’t always have to be roses: Levkojen also look pretty in the vase.imago
“Did you always know you wanted to stay here?” I asked.
“Nope, absolutely not!” she replied, shaking her head. “I studied in Hanover and loved living in a bigger city. Going out at night, having a cinema around the corner, things like that, you know? It’s pretty boring here in Sinzheim.”
“But you’re here despite everything?”
“Well,” she said with a shrug, “my parents and I have this country. And so we can make a very direct contribution to stopping climate change. I couldn’t forgive myself for not using it.”
Sonia is young, the whole world is open to her. And yet she decided to stay here, in little Sinzheim, somewhere west of Baden-Baden, to achieve what her father couldn’t do without her – turning away from conventional horticulture and towards certified organic flower production.
Respect, Sonia!
At the end, I asked the young gardener whether she had any wishes for the future. “Yes, of course,” she answered without hesitation. “Anyone who buys a bouquet of flowers should ask their florist about organic products. I wish that.”
Anne Smith
Sabine place
has been working as a television journalist for ZDF for more than 20 years. There she regularly produces reports on the subject of nature, gardens, ecology and sustainability for the “Platz im Garten” section in the “Morgenmagazin”. In October 2021 her book “In the garden: Between tuber and compost lies the whole of life”.