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Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Olympic Flowers ‘10: Just Choose June
To make its victory bouquets, Vancouver’s Olympics committee has chosen a florist with prison credentials.
June Strandberg, florist for the Vancouver Winter Olympics
Photo: Sharon Doucette, for Surry Now
Conscientious consumption—the demonstration of ethics via your nearest and dearest commodities—will take the international stage next year, in the grip of swooshing ski jumpers and jaw-rattled luge riders.
The organizing committee for Vancouver’s Winter Olympics 2010 has chosen Just Beginnings Flowers to make the 1500 bouquets for next winter’s Olympic champions.
Just Beginnings, HFP readers may recall, is a fascinating flower shop that combines social uplift with retailing. Owner June Strandberg trains recovering addicts and ex-prisoners in floral design, offering instruction in the basement of her shop in Surry’s Phoenix Centre. Strandberg has also taught floristry behind bars.
Culture & Society • Cut-Flower Trade • Florists • Secular Customs • Permalink
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Debating a Purple Carnation
Genetically-modified imports and crops are under much more intense public scrutiny in Europe than in the U.S. This week, EU ag leaders split over whether to admit another mauve novelty from Florigene.
Arrangement with genetically-modified purple carnations
Photo: Florigene
The European Union is not so unified when it comes to genetically modified crops. This past week EU agriculture ministers split on whether to allow imports of a GM rapeseed and a ghoulish strain of purple carnation concocted in Australia.
On the rapeseed question, ag representatives from 12 countries favored the import, 14 voted against, and Ireland abstained. Because EU countries’ votes are weighted, this outcome constituted a tie – and the matter will be decided by “the EU executive” – which appears to mean “permission granted.”
“Under EU rules, the EU’s executive European Commission now gains the legal power to issue a default authorisation. Since 2004, the Brussels-based Commission has approved a string of GM products, nearly all maize, in this way, outraging green groups.”
Cut-Flower Trade • Ecology • Florists • Politics • Science • Permalink
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Here Come Santa Claus Flowers
With poinsettia sales down, we still bring tidings of ho-ho-horticulture.
Santa Claus rides again into the flower stand at San Francisco’s Union Square
Photo: Ranjay Mitra
The North Pole is not noted for its floriculture, but could anything measley as arctic ice thwart Santa Claus?
He appeared for the 45th year in a row in San Francisco’s Union Square with mounds of chrysanthemums, daisies, gladiolas, and stems of eucalyptus. The old elf arrived on an energy-efficient bicycle, having laid off the reindeer in a down economy.
Cut-Flower Trade • Florists • Gardening & Landscape • Secular Customs • Permalink
Saturday, December 06, 2008
Flower Crime, Flower Enforcement
Flowers are anti-vigilante, which makes them good accomplices.
With wine and flowers, a scammer in Sydney gets caught on camera
Photo: Livenews
Ornamental, yes. Accessories to crime – Flowers are that too.
Thieves too lead-footed for cat burgling and too broke for the full six-week session of crime camp have a special affinity for blooming things. We’ve run a couple of stories on this theme already. But over the past six months, there’ve been so many crime stories with floral perps we started to compile a whole rap sheet.
There was the guy in Maple Grove, Minnesota, who ordered flowers and a gift box sent to a local bank; he then phoned in, saying the box contained a bomb. The robber demanded that a garbage bag full of money be delivered to a limo waiting outside, met and tipped the limo driver several blocks away, and managed to get off – for awhile, anyway – with $30,000.
There was the bouquet an elderly woman spotted outside her apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. When she opened the door, two “deliverymen” stormed in, proceeded to tie her up and gag her, and ransacked her flat. They took off with $75,000.