Will you give your valentine a bucket full of pesticides?

While we'd fully admit that pesticides don't usually come to mind when choosing red roses for a valentine, we believe it's about time to start asking people to think about it. True, we don't normally eat our flowers and, for the most part, they're not worn against the skin, so that's probably why its taken longer to recognise the environmental issues surrounding the production of cut flowers.

So the big debate is raging - what is considered environmentally correct in the flower industry? Should all flowers be organic, grown without any synthetic or toxic pesticides? Or should the emphasis be on fair trade flowers, which means that the workers on the flower farms are safe and paid a fair wage? Should we choose locally grown flowers, reducing the cost of emissions? Which flowers can truly be called green?

Image Sweet Loving Flowers

For the next three days we'll tackle each of these questions in greater depth, looking at the pros and cons of each.