What a brilliant idea.
Sometimes the selfless, spontaneous acts of kindness are the best and if you were in Limerick over the weekend you could have been at the receiving end of one of them.
White Doves Nurseries decided to make beautiful bouquets with their left over flowers and place them around Limerick City for random people to find.
They said that instead of the flowers going to waste or being thrown away, they wanted to do something different.
It’s a shame to throw away flowers, so this week’s leftovers made up into a #lonelybouquet clues to locations below… #Limerick pic.twitter.com/1m7jouaOiR
— White Dove Nurseries (@WhiteDoveLMK) July 30, 2017
With a little note reading, “A Lonely Bouquet, take me home we’d love to know where it ends up,” one was left at Terry Wogan’s statue while others were left at various spots around the city.
Niamh Browne was one of the first people to find one of the bouquets.
Limerick, you’re as cute! #LonelyBouquet #Limerick #RandomActsOfKindness #PayItForward #FlowersForTerry pic.twitter.com/TsU1rGzrjc
— Niamh Brown (@Niamh_Brown29) July 30, 2017
Tara, the owner of the company told us that she usually gives away the flowers to other people working in Limerick’s Milk Market where she is based, but this time around she wanted to do something different.
She said:
“I often have leftover flowers, floristry is a high volume wastage business which makes it fairly challenging – my normal route of disposal is to offer them to the hard working lads at The Milk Market to take home to their significant others – but this week I had been working late, and there was no one to share the ends with.
I can’t claim to have invented the Lonely Bouquet idea, it’s been a florist meme that’s been circulating the last year or two, and I have left some bouquets around town like this before during last summer, but this particular rainy afternoon it just came to mind to join in again with a few bouquets.”
She said that people were slow to actually take the flowers but a lot of people stopped to read the note:
“I sat back and observed the first few people walking past, but didn’t spot anyone picking them up, but a lot stopped and read the labels
I also thought poor Terry could do with cheering up, since there is talk of him being melted down and re-created, so that was my first choice of location, and then next to the street art on the dilapidated shop fronts of Ellen Street, opposite Ormston House, another place in Limerick that needs a spot of love.”
Tara also said that it was important to her to honour the hard work that goes into the production and distribution of every flower she uses:
“Sustainability in business is a big issue for me, and with the commercial flower trade there is a huge amount of wastage product – when you think about how these flowers are grown abroad, with lighting and heating and water use, then flown to the Auctions in Aalsmeer, then delivered by trucks to every florist in Ireland, often less than 72 hours after you order them, each petal carries quite a carbon load – not to mention the skill, training and knowledge that each grower has to produce such delicate product, for them to end up in a bin.”
She also wants to encourage others to do the same and find a better way to use spare or leftover flowers, food or clothing:
“So as well as cheering a couple of people up, I hope it brings into focus the wider question of what we do with waste flowers, food, clothing etc – perhaps a Charity Shop / Florists, where commercial flowers are donated to, and the proceeds of them fund a charity project? With the huge amount spent on wedding flowers, it could be a sweet way to give back.”
