Welcome to Borders Eco Flowers

We are Mike and Bridget Bevan and we run a small family business growing sustainable cut flowers. Our garden is located at The Moorhouse, just outside Duns in the beautiful Scottish Borders.  We grow an abundance of traditional and unusual, seasonal flowers as well as a stunning variety of foliage, seed-heads, grasses and herbs.  We gather the flowers at their peak and create gorgeous posies, bouquets and wreaths and all kinds of floral creations.

The concept of sustainability is at the very heart of our business - the idea that we work in step with the natural world rather than against it. So we set out to grow flowers with ten principles in mind;

1. Our flowers are grown here, not flown here, so they rack up zero air-miles and very few road miles. ‘Local flowers for our local community’ is what we say. We never buy in flowers from abroad or from other U.K. growers, so you can be assured that your flowers are grown in the Scottish Borders. Over 95% are grown right here at The Moorhouse, near Duns – BordersEcoFlowers HQ. In Winter, we forage locally and responsibly – always with permission and we are grateful to friends and neighbours for allowing us to snip from gardens, hedges and woodlands.

2. Our flowers are strictly seasonal, as nature intended, so that each floral display that we create has a sense of place and time. The type of flowers we harvest changes as the year unfolds, starting with snowdrops and aconites in January, through to daffodils, tulips and alliums in Spring. Then summers’ bounty arrives with sweet peas, roses, and buckets of annuals. Autumn brings jewels; chrysanthemums, dahlias, coloured foliage and bright berries. And the year comes to an end with aromatic evergreens and bright red dogwood stems. So the wheel turns again – spring, summer, autumn, winter- each season with its own extensive menu.

3. We encourage biodiversity in the garden by growing a range of different types of plants from the tiniest erythronium to the majestic sycamore. Grassy areas, flower beds, shrub borders, hedges, mature trees, stone walls, mossy tree stumps and log piles – each providing habitats for the myriad of flora and fauna we want to welcome to the garden.

 4. We do not use peat in the garden. For too long, peat has been used as a soil conditioner and as a component of potting compost. But its extraction depletes precious peat bogs which represent an invaluable habitat for many rare and vulnerable native species. We choose to start our seeds in peat-free compost.

5.  We nourish the soil with organic feeds - never anything that derives from a chemical factory. The soil lies at the very heart of our business (without healthy soil we cannot hope to produce healthy plants!). And it is by applying homemade compost, as much as we can make, that maintains the fertility and structure of the soil. All plant material from the garden - grass clippings, weeds, leaves, prunings, wood ash as well as vegetable peelings and cardboard packaging from the house are recycled via the compost heap.

We also keep a small flock of hens and ducks, who not only provide us with delicious eggs (think fantastic omelettes and yummy meringues) but also trot round the garden, day in day out, depositing little blobs of organic fertilizer all over the flowerbeds. We don’t even need to spread it – perfect!

6. We do not use chemical weedkillers or pesticides so you can be sure that your flowers will not contain nasty chemical residues though you might find the occasional ladybird. Our plot is by no means weed free, but we prefer to hand weed with fork, hoe and spade, rather than resort to chemical weedkillers. Similarly, we accept that we will lose a small percentage of our crop to pests, but we understand that the complex interrelationships of the food web will at some point achieve an acceptable balance.

7. Our flowers are super-fresh, often delivered to your door within 24 hours of us cutting them. They are given nothing but fresh cold water straight from the borehole in the garden.  Our flowers simply don’t require a sachet of chemical preservatives to keep them going; they naturally have a long vase life for you to get maximum enjoyment.

8. We love to rummage in our local charity shops, including the Berwickshire Association for Voluntary Service (affectionately known as BAVS) and the Borders Pet Rescue in Duns. Many a time we have found wonderful vases, jugs, tea cups and all manner of containers that we recycle and upcycle to craft into unique floral displays.  For larger creations, we use (and reuse) a stack of old suitcases, a pair of vintage milk churns and even Grannies old 1940’s bicycle.

9. We are reducing our use of plastic at every opportunity;                         

we do not use plastic plant pots or trays for plant propagation, we prefer soil blocks and clay pots.  

we do not use black plastic membrane as a weed suppressant, we prefer cardboard.  

we do not use plastic floral foam (0asis), we prefer chicken wire, pin-holders, gravel and twigs. 

we do not use plastic packaging and ribbons, we prefer, as Maria sung, “Brown paper packages tied up with string”. Tissue paper, brown paper, hessian, jute, hemp, cotton, tartan…. All plant-based materials that will go on the compost heap.

10. You can call us old-fashioned, but we prefer to deliver our fabulous flowers personally, rather than trust a courier. Knock, knock? Who’s there? Its Mike from BordersEcoFlowers! You’ll see him buzzing about in our Zero emission electric car with SatNat at the ready and the boot filled with buckets of beautiful blooms.  Local flowers for local people!

BordersEcoFlowers – putting the ‘eco’ back into floristry