Why you have no excuse not to send flowers today

Greens disapprove of Valentine's bouquets due to the enviromental cost of flying them in from places like Kenya. But if you really want to be ethical, buy as many Kenyan red roses as you can afford, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

There are few things on which the UK's green lobby and Saudi Arabia's vice squad would probably agree. But here's one: Valentines Day flowers are a bad thing.

The Saudi religious police hate bouquets and red roses in particular because they think they encourage people to have sex when they shouldn't so they've banned them. Our eco warriors hate them just as much for rather different reasons: they disapprove of the chemicals used to grow commercial flowers and of the fact that most of the ones we pass around on February 14th are flown in from countries such as Kenya and are therefore thought be to particularly environmentally unfriendly.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.