Human Flower Project
Florists
Monday, November 08, 2004
Flower Competition Turns Vicious before Festival of Kali
Flower suppliers in India’s northwestern provinces have come to blows over the rights to supply blossoms for fall rites.
The Statesman (Kolkata, India) again reports today on the seething antagonism between flower sellers in Bengal.
“The Goddess (Kali) is likely to be worshiped with fewer flowers in different pandals in Siliguri and other parts of north Bengal this year,” the paper reports, because local leadership “has sealed the entry of flowers from south Bengal, which supplies the bulk to the town.”
Just before another Hindu festival in late September, flower sellers from the south “were attacked by local flower traders on Sevak Road in Siliguri and flowers worth several thousand rupees destroyed.” In October, out-of-town florists were beaten up at the Siliguri bus station and forced from town. A group of the southern Bengal flower vendors organized a road block in protest.
The state horticulture minister “expressed his helplessness” over the situation today.
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
No Necesita a Henry Higgins
You won’t find any Eliza Doolittles among the flower vendors of San Antonio’s Castroville Road. They’ve stood up to the local flower shops, lobbied the city council for the right to sell, and around El Dia de Los Muertos, they’re working around the clock.
Castroville Road, San Antonio
Carmen Almaguer is a flower lady down to her sandals: they strap onto her rough feet with a band of plastic blooms.
For twelve days around The Day of the Dead, November 2, Almaguer and her family coordinate a non-stop relay, bringing flowers to San Antonio’s West Side. Along with some forty other street vendors, they set up at dawn beneath umbrellas in the parking lot of Las Palmas shopping center, where a rivulet of buyers trickles all day and into the evening. Nearly all her customers will take what they buy across the street, to San Fernando II Cemetery, observing the centuries old custom of All Souls Day.
Carmen Almaguer
Almaguer, at age 72, has been doing this work since the late 1970s. Two decades ago, local flower shops tried to shut down the open-air market along Castroville Road, but the city council ruled in favor of the street vendors. If they buy a city license for $180, they can sell here for a few specified days around the six main floral occasions: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and All Souls, known in Mexico, and much of San Antonio, as El Dia de los Muertos.
Maria Orta cuts zinnias at the Verstuyfts’ farm.
Almaguer makes up some arrangments of artificial flowers to sell. For $75, she also buys several rows of field flowers from Roger Verstuft, whose farm is just south of the city. Each morning and evening, Carmen, her sister Maria Orta, one nephew and a grandson, take the pickup to Verstuft’s fields and pick their own marigolds, zinnias and feathers (a type of coxcomb). They pack up several washtubs of fresh flowers, taking them home to trim, mix and arrange into coffee-can vases. By early afternoon, Almaguer’s fresh flowers, $5 a bunch, have sold out.
Carmen works down a row of feathers.
(All Saints is a huge floral holiday in the Philippines also. The Manila Times published this
“ title=” dangwa flower market in manila”>report on the busy Dangwa flower market, where yellow chrysanthemums are the favorite flower of the season.)
Monday, October 25, 2004
Masked Deliverymen
Two Holmdel, New Jersey, residents have been burglarized so far this year by men claiming to be delivering flowers.
A puzzling story in today’s Independent (Holmdel, NJ) reports that thieves posing as flower delivermen stole a safe containing some $750,000 of jewelry from a Holmdel house.
Local police said that in May, a group of men claiming to be on a flower delivery errand entered another house in the town, pistol whipped the resident, and stole cash.
Condolences to these innocent folks.
Let’s all repeat together now:
Flower deliverers don’t travel in packs.
Flower deliverers don’t wear masks.
Flower deliverers are carrying flowers.
Friday, October 22, 2004
The Stuff of Urban Legend, and Florist History
A child picks up silk flowers in Toronto and winds up at the hospital.
First there were razors in candied apples at Halloween, or so somebody said, putting the kabosh on trick or treating. (In my youth, this rumor ran around, and some communities urged parents to have their children’s bubble-gum and Snickers x-rayed.)
Now the Toronto Sun reports that a 10-year-old girl picked up artificial flowers booby-thorned with razor blades.
“Police are worried the incident is a copycat crime in the wake of razor blades found hidden in a beach volleyball court in Toronto last month, and shards of glass found glued to a children’s slide at a Burlington public park this month,” the Sun reported.
Rema Salisbury, the Canadian child, wound up with stitches in her finger. She isn’t the first person to be cut by razor-bearing flowers, though. Gerald McPhail, owner of Airport Florist in Austin, Texas, explained to me that in the 1940s and ‘50s, every sizeable flower shop was equipped with a “picking machine.”
“It would mechanically put a steel pick on the end of a flower,” so that a florist could poke each flower precisely into a funeral spray, McPhail said.
“It’s just a little thin piece of aluminum or tin, razor sharp, and it had barbs on it,” McPhail explained. “There’s very bad stories about young people doing things at funeral homes or stuff they shouldn’t do, throwing and playing catch and grabbing and getting one of those picks and almost literally cutting a finger off.” Florists, too, might be hasty, “getting their finger the wrong way into the machine and picking their finger. It’s off to Brackenridge (Hospital) and a couple of hours surgery to get that pick off of you.”