The Flower Fields

The Flower Fields was commissioned and published by NEPN (North East Photography Network) as part of ‘Observe Experiment Archive’.

Between March 2019 and February 2020 I worked with commercial flower growers around Spalding in Lincolnshire, one of the UK’s major cut flower growing regions, to explore how technology is changing how we grow flowers in this country. This included traditional Lincolnshire mixed rotation family farms and larger commercial growers who mainly grow a limited range of flowers under glass and are pioneering the use of various technologies including hydroponics and optical graders.

This new work is located in South Holland, a rural district in the South East of Lincolnshire where man drained, reclaimed and enclosed nearly three quarters of a million acres of fenland and by the late 1800s flower bulbs produced both for cut flowers and for sale as a dried bulb were a well-established crop in the Spalding area.

Tessa Bunney, 2020