Behind the Palace Gates: Where Royal Flower Bouquets Really Go
From hotel room vases to church donations, here's what really happens to the hundreds of bouquets the royal family receives from the public each year.
Royal walkabouts go like clockwork: the royal rolls up in an expensive car with security following behind, they step out, and immediately a waiting child steps forward with a bouquet of flowers clutched in their little hands. The royal family member crouches down, accepts it, and the whole thing is photographed from 17 different angles. It’s one of the sweetest rituals of public royal life. Plus, the public brings hundreds of bouquets as well.
But what happens next? After the cameras stop rolling and the engagement wraps up, Kate Middleton isn’t going home and putting the flower bouquet in her kitchen or on her nightstand.
How Many Flowers Are We Actually Talking About?
While it’s not publicly recorded how many bouquets of flowers the royal family receives every year, the scale is obviously significant. Senior working royals carry out hundreds of official engagements every year, and flowers are presented at almost all of them. On a busier walkabout like a jubilee celebration or a royal tour, a single royal might receive dozens of bouquets in an afternoon alone. Over the course of a year, the volume of flower bouquets can approach the thousands.
That's a lot of flowers. And they have to go somewhere.
What Actually Happens to Them
Many gifts from the public must go through a strict security check before the royal family can even keep them, but flowers are treated very differently. You may also see royal family members politely accepting a flower bouquet and handing it over to a member of staff or an equerry to carry, most often out of practicality (it’s pretty hard to shake hands while holding an armful of roses).
Things can vary quite a bit, depending on location. If the royals are on tour and staying in a hotel, the flowers are often brought back to their room and displayed in a vase. It’s a small detail that gives a lovely human feeling to the whole thing. If you also like the look of flowers displayed in a vase, try this one from Target that has lovely blue flower detailing.
In the United Kingdom, however, the flowers rarely stay with the royal family for long. Those close to the royals have revealed that the flowers often end up going to churches or charities at the end of the day. Keith Roy of the Monarchist League of Canada told Good to Know, "The gifts are often given away to the different charities that they're highlighting."
It's a very royal, very practical solution to an impractical amount of flowers, and one that makes the gesture that much sweeter. Someone gives flowers to a royal, and those same flowers end up at a hospice or church somewhere: a natural cycle.
The Flowers Left at Palace Gates
A separate category altogether, but still worth mentioning, are the flowers left by the public at palace gates during moments of significance. When Queen Elizabeth II died in September 2022, the sea of flowers outside Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and Sandringham became one of the defining images of mourning. The amount of flowers was astounding, but it still raised the question: what actually happens to them?
In those circumstances, it’s often managed by palace staff who work to make sure the floral tributes are handled respectfully. Often, the public is asked to remove plastic wrapping from a bouquet of flowers before leaving it, to help with composting. Most of the floral material is eventually composted and used on royal estates; so, flowers return to their soil in the most literal sense. If you also want to compost in your own garden, this Cozurra 45-gallon Compost tumbler is available on Amazon for a great price.
The Tradition Behind Royal Bouquets
The giving of flowers to royals is one of the oldest and most universal forms of showing the public’s admiration and affection for them. And, there is also a lot of tradition behind flowers within the royal family itself.
For example, every royal wedding bouquet dating back all the way to Queen Victoria has to carry a sprig of myrtle. And that sprig of myrtle isn’t just picked up from any old garden store. When Prince Albert’s grandmother gave Victoria a posy containing myrtle during a visit to Gotha, Germany, Victoria planted a sprig of it at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, where it still grows today. Queen Elizabeth II carried it, Diana carried it, KateMiddleton carried it, and Meghan Markle carried it. If you like the look of myrtle, you can get the seeds from Seedville USA at Walmart.
The next time you see a royal getting flower bouquets from the public, it’s worth knowing it won’t go to waste. It’ll end up in a vase, or a church, or charity, and occasionally, if the timing is right, in the hands of someone who needed it far more than the palace did.
