After Covid, Kenya’s flower industry is gearing up for its next challenge

The alpine slopes of Kenya’s extinct volcanoes are the floral equivalent of Bordeaux. It’s there that the roses grow for the world’s weddings, funerals and Valentine’s Day bouquets. The higher the altitude, the larger your flower head, and roses raised in the shadow of Mount Kenya’s glaciers, or on the vast caldera of Mount Elgon, come in a dazzling spectrum of colours, petal shapes and scents.

In normal years, billions of blooms fly out of Nairobi, destined for everywhere from Shanghai and Riyadh to Melbourne and Slough. But in 2020, the roses bloomed in vain.

The world’s skies emptied of aircraft in March 2020, and Kenya’s rose growers threw away mountains of flowers that could not be exported. Workers took armfuls of roses home — but job layoffs followed the collapse of business and many workers drifted home to villages and back to the soil. To lift the spirits of slum dwellers, Nairobi’s governor distributed bottles of Hennessy, which he described as an anti-virus throat sanitiser.

I worried that the industry wouldn’t recover, but in fact the speed with which it bounced back was astonishing. For the rest of the pandemic, rose growers like Tim Hobbs on Mount Kenya did a roaring trade. ‘Flowers became a proxy for seeing people — thinking of you, wish we were together,’ says Tim, who supplies the likes of Wild at Heart, Simon Lycett and the Real Flower Company. Next-day flower deliveries quadrupled. Bob Andersen, who grows 80 million roses a year on a Mount Elgon farm his family has had for a century, sent huge numbers of roses each week to Russia, some of them travelling nine days across Africa, then by plane to Holland, then by truck to Novosibirsk on Siberia’s mighty river Ob.

Flowers are peculiarly gratifying to give and to get: there’s the elation of being given them, seeing them open, thrive, fade and then die.