Brexshit
At 11pm on the night of January 29th 2020, Irish and UK nurseries couldn’t send each other stuff any more and it became illegal to bring back lovely things in the back of your car on the boat or packed into your bag on a plane. At 10.59pm, you could.
Out of all the detrimental and redundant shit that has resulted from the great British public voting to make the landmass of the UK an even more irrelevant and tiny fart of rock, the new requirement of phytosanitary certification on plant material, for me, is the most mind-fuckingly stoopid.
I COULD, as a grower still send to the UK.. if I had a million hours, a dedicated office team filling out forms and my UK customers were happy to wait for their order to be inspected by a government dept before issuing a phyto-cert (after being pre-warned 14 days before export of the order.) UK buyers then have to pay their own import fee on top of this, from a list that has a different import inspection fee depending on the genera/species making the whole thing, absolutely pointless and unviable for small producers.
There is more to the reason why I find this completely redundant though and this is why. The UK is an island. Ireland is an island. We are in close proximity. The European mainland is MASSIVE and connected by land to, almost the entire rest of the world. The making illegal of moving plant material grown by small, independent growers based in the UK and Ireland is potentially creating an absolute ecological nightmare!
Right now, if I chose to do so, as a grower in Ireland, I could import a whole boatload of stock intensively grown on an industrial sized nursery in the EU somewhere the only requirement being that the plants had an EU passport. Among those plants could be any number of funky pests and diseases that travelled in from all over mainland Europe. Ireland is possibly going to become a lovely melting pot of new pests and disease, not because some plantaholic smuggled back a species Pelargonium from a nursery in the UK, but because garden centres, supermarkets, landscaping companies and wholesale nurseries are sourcing their stock from European growers.
I resent the fact that UK and Irish growers and gardeners can’t easily buy material from each other any more and I resent the fact we can no longer, legally at least, share plants. It’s an absolute farce! Never mind the detrimental carbon footprint of shipping stuff over large distances where a few years ago it could be bunged on a ferry and bumped across in a matter of hours.
Anyone who voted for Brexit is an idiot.
