Daffodils

A tale of everyday cut flowers

Cut flowers work as anchor commodities for multiple consumer festivals. One is Valentine’s Day; another is Mother’s Day. But cut flowers also feature centrally in life-event occasions. Take weddings. Multiple bouquets and button-hole decorations single out the key participants in the ceremony, whilst the reception venue is typically decked out in standalone floral displays. Even the tables where guests sit to eat are seen to require modest floral decoration. Weddings, then, are a bonanza for florists, and they are a key market for cut flower producers. So too, funerals.

For sure, events like weddings and funerals are not a pan-society special occasion like Christmas, Halloween or Mother’s Day, where it’s the day that orders everyone’s patterns of consumption. Instead, these are special occasions defined by a more exclusionary sociality; they’re defined by, and restricted to, specific social connections – of friends and family. But, since everyone is connected to someone, that means that everyone participates in some way or another with these sorts of life-event special occasions, finding ourselves, particularly at certain stages of life, either holding or wearing cut flowers, or staring at them. In such a way, the doing of society, through people’s lives, produces a constant demand for cut flowers for special occasions.

In the UK though there’s one exception to this rule about cut flowers and special occasions: daffodils.

Daffodils here are what can be called an everyday cut flower. Sold in supermarkets and convenience stores, and on market stalls, on high streets and by transport interchanges from January through to May, they’re available at rock-bottom prices for a bunch: usually of the order of around about £1. At prices like this they’ve become the cut flowers that get thrown in with the weekly shop, the impulse buy purchased to light up dark late-winter days, and the convenience purchase for hospital visiting. Yet, here’s the paradox: daffodils are simultaneously a special occasion flower. Since 1911, when David Lloyd George insisted they be adopted as such, they’ve been the flower worn in Wales to celebrate the national day, St David’s Day (1 March).

In the rest of this post I want to unpack how this paradox has shaped the production of daffodils in post-Brexit Britain.

Let’s start with the everyday side of things.

Daffodil cultivation is a relatively recent phenomenon in the UK - notwithstanding the famous lines penned by the Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Those lines relate to daffodils growing in the wild in the Lake District. But daffodil cultivation began in the late 1870s on the Isles of Scilly with a potato farmer, one William Trevillick, who started cutting semi-wild narcissi and shipping them, by boat and rail, to the London market. Some 10 years later, cultivation had become commercialised and had also spread to mainland West Cornwall. Now the UK is the major producer of commercially grown daffodils in the world. Roughly 4k hectares and three growing areas – South Lincolnshire/Norfolk, West Cornwall and the Grampians (Moray) – produce around 900 million stems per annum in the season, which lasts from mid-January through May. This accounts for 90% of global daffodil output, roughly 50% of which is exported – to Europe and North America.

Harvesting daffodils is a very labour intensive business. Bunches are hand-picked. To harvest 4k ha requires of the order of 3000 people, labouring as pickers and packers in the fields and pack-houses. Picking is hard physical work, out in all weathers in rural locations. It’s also poorly remunerated. Current pay is at the level of the National Living Wage - £11.44 per hour. Shifts are long, typically 6-12 hours, with 20 minutes rest in a 6-hour stint. There are targets for picking but piece rate incentivisation ensures that most workers will work harder for longer. Minus costs (living accommodation, food, utilities and service bills), one worker might clear £3-400 per week. For all these reasons, the work is unattractive to UK workers and there has long been a dependence in the sector on Eastern European migrant workers.

Just as with soft fruit, Brexit brought huge problems for daffodil cultivators, who suddenly were minus all the Bulgarian and Romanian labour that provided the vast majority of their workers. The result in early 2021, predictably, was daffodils rotting in the fields, and headline after headline in the mainstream media documenting this.

That it was daffodils rotting in the fields that caught the attention of the media is an indication of their cultural value and the lobbying efforts of the daffodil/bulb industry. Globalisation may have ensured the continued supply of soft fruit in winter for Brexit Britain, but Brexit had removed the labour that was behind the appearance in UK homes of its everyday, cheap cut flower. Suddenly, with no labour in the daffodil fields there was nothing to brighten the winter, no St David’s Day flower and no emblem of hope for the Marie Curie cancer charity, which in 1986 had adopted the flower as its logo.

It is this which lay behind a key policy U-turn for a government with Brexit at its core.

With food security an increasing priority for the UK, an early exemption to Brexit rules on migrant labour was for agricultural workers. Ornamental cultivation however was not included in the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS), which granted 6-month short stay visas for agricultural workers. That exclusion was on the grounds that ornamental cultivation had nothing to do with food production. But headline after headline in the major right wing dailies bemoaning a culturally iconic flower rotting in the fields forced an about turn. Cut flower (and bulb) cultivation got a reprieve, meaning migrant labour could be recruited for these purposes.

The bigger question is from where. The latest Seasonal Workers’ Survey produced by Defra (2024) records a major shift in source destination. Aided by support from the UK’s Conflict, Security and Stability Fund (now the Integrated Security Fund, to the tune of £1.6m), the UK’s agricultural labour force is now sourced overwhelmingly via recruitment fairs in Central Asian states. In 2024, 68% alone came from Kyrgyzstan (24%), Tajikistan (17%), Kazakhstan (15%) and Uzbekistan (12%). 81% were single males. In 2025 one of the major SAWS providers recruiting for daffodil workers targeted the following countries: Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Moldovia, Northern Macedonia and Kenya. The resolution to a labour shortage produced by Brexit then has necessitated the recruitment of yet more migrant labour from much more far-distant places.

That humble bunch of daffs sitting in a vase may look like a harbinger of spring but what it represents at one level is a story of Brexit culture wars in a commodity, and their resolution; the substitution of one version of migrant labour for another.

At another level, that same bunch is an important corrective to the standard story of globalisation, exemplified by a bouquet of roses for Valentine’s Day, in which the consumers of the global North rely on cheap labour in the global South. Producing everyday cut flowers in the UK to sell to UK consumers for £1 a bunch requires instead that migrant labour come to the UK. There’s no other economic way. But there is an ethics to the conditions of that closer-to-home cultivation, and particularly harvesting, that is deserving of much wider scrutiny.

Next time you’re in a supermarket or at the online check out and that tempting bunch of daffs is put in front of you as a cheap impulse buy, think about what lies behind it.