M&S Flowers: Meet the Rose Grower

Today I'm coming to visit one of the best rose growers I know of in the world, Maya, very near the city of Delft in Holland. For Mars and Spencer, whether it's for food or flowers, our sourcing is incredibly important. We always buy direct from the grower and that's why I'm delighted to be here today in a glasshouse actually looking at the crop. Here it's all about avalanche. It started off with white, that's the one that's known as avalanche. We have pearl avalanche which has a lovely soft peachy quality to it. Sweet avalanche, a really nice candy pink and then the very newest variety just coming along now, Four Seasons. We're seeing an amazing trend at the moment for rose walls at weddings, celebrity events. They often come from Maya, people sourcing the best of the best and we're building one today just to showcase these amazing avalanche roses. We source roses from all the best places in the world and that could be Kenya, Colombia and then at the top of the tree it's Holland. We work really closely with our suppliers and rose breeders to create new varieties crossing many thousands of potential new roses to create one or two truly unique colour varieties. Here at Maya the rose is left on the plant for a long time in order to get a maximum stem length and the largest possible head and then every care is taken twice a day where the products are hand-picked. For Maya we only buy the A1 grade and that's in terms of stem length and head size although from across the world we offer roses to suit every pocket. The colour of roses is incredibly important. White is the colour of purity, it makes us feel calm, it's an open space. Yellow is the colour of friendship and it relates to the emotion of joy. Red, it triggers our fight or flight instincts which can easily be related back to that feeling of passion and love. That all comes back to sort of Victorian times when they were very good at actually giving every flower a meaning and a significance. Colour really is a language, when you give someone the gift of a flower bouquet you're really giving them the gift of your emotions. I love roses really for their versatility, they really are fantastic for any occasion. To take that forward we're very excited to be launching a roses.com page which will just really focus on all our hero rose products and that would be Fairtrade from Kenya, Large Headed from Colombia and then in our autograph range some really amazing autograph roses featuring Avalanche.