Earth Day at Native Poppy

You may not be surprised to learn that in Native Poppy’s flower shops, every day is Earth Day! We depend on a stable climate, healthy soil, and clean water to be able to deliver the gorgeous blooms you love, and we are dedicated to doing our part to preserve the planet’s resources. Two of Native Poppy’s core values touch on our commitment to the environment:

Care for Petals and People: We water our relationships, till our own soil, and take care of mama earth.

Waste Not, Want Not: We use every minute, every scrap and every opportunity to work efficiently and with haste.

How do these values come into play each day? We “care for petals and people” in many ways, but one of the biggest is our partnerships with local flower farms, including Native Poppy’s own flower garden in El Cajon. We’re sourcing as many blooms as possible from local growers, reducing our carbon footprint by ordering fewer flowers imported from far off locales. We believe that investing in local agriculture is a positive step toward reducing the impact of climate change. The micro flower farms we partner with act as carbon sinks while they improve the air quality in our community.

After losing two of our delivery vans to the devastating floods that hit our studio in January of 2024, we were determined to make lemonade with the lemons we were given, and invested in an all-electric delivery van! We nicknamed the van Bumble Bee (BB for short!) and gave it a cute custom designed wrap to help share our dedication to sustainability while our drivers are out on the road. While our team makes deliveries, sometimes the recipient isn’t home, and a delivery driver needs to leave a flower wrap on the porch. We use hydration packs to keep the stems in water while they wait to be discovered when the recipient returns home. We were proud to switch to super cute biodegradable bags for our hydration packs last year, and we haven’t looked back!

Our team is passionate about our green waste program, and we’ve expanded our efforts significantly over the past several years. Florists take special care to separate green waste while processing their flowers, ensuring that organic material is sent to special city facilities for composting. Our recycling program is stronger than ever, and we’re proud to rely on cloth towels for cleaning in our shops, reducing our reliance on single use paper towels.

Eliminating floral foam from all our designs has been a priority for our team – we’ve successfully replaced floral foam in many of our large scale installations by using reusable vessels and chicken wire as often as possible. Our goal is to make the switch to eco-friendly alternatives like Agrawool or Oshun Pouches, and we’re actively testing alternatives to provide a seamless experience for our customers. Great news: the floral products in our Daily Flower Menu are already completely foam free!

“Waste not, want not,” is a guiding principle in all aspects of the business. Florists take care to save as much usable material as possible while processing flowers – short stems are saved to use as anchor focals in flower arrangements, or as part of a flower crown. Even tiny scraps of dried flowers are saved while we produce our signature dried flower wrapped bouquets – those mini castoffs are saved for special projects like boutonnières, or micro bouquets that are an in-store special. We know how much work goes into growing a single bloom, and we feel it’s our responsibility to honor that effort by taking a proactive approach to waste, reducing it at the very beginning.

We also offer a vase buy back program to help our customers reduce waste at home! When you bring back a vase from any arrangement purchased at Native Poppy – that’s anything from our small glass bud vases to a tall ceramic vase – we’ll give you $5 in free fresh flowers from our stem bar to take home that day! Bring back two vases, take home $10 of free flowers, bring back five vases and receive $25 in free flowers, and so on, up to $250 per person. It’s a win-win: we’ll reuse the vase, keeping it out of the landfill, and you’ll enjoy some fresh blooms as a reward.

With the news of climate change and microplastic pollution more alarming than ever, we’re committed to finding as many ways as possible to be part of the solution. This Earth Day, we’re renewing our commitment to the planet, and looking forward to finding new ways to make our flower shop even more sustainable.