Human Flower Project


Orrington, MAINE USA

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Murrieta, CALIFORNIA USA

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Princeton, MAINE USA

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Flower Confidential


Amy Stewart tracks the savvy, shady flower business, a refrigerated industry on parade.


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Lily hybridizer Leslie Woodriff with Star Gazer and others

Photo: via North Coast Journal

“The commerce in blossoming flowers is one of the most uncertain and dangerous speculations in which the small street-traders of London can engage,” wrote Englishman Charles Manby Smith, in 1853.

Amy Stewart, whom we can thank for finding this pearl, describes how much has changed since Mr. Smith voiced his misgivings. Her book Flower Confidential (Algonquin) witnesses the combined effects of science, high-speed transportation, free trade and mass marketing as they transformed an “uncertain” livelihood into a global industry. Botanical guess-work and much of the commercial risk have been squeezed out of the flower trade; now mechanized greenhouses protect plants from the vagaries of weather, refrigerated trucks, planes and warehouses provide transcontinental “cold chains,” and individual “condones” prevent rose buds from opening ahead of schedule. And of course, we consumers are caught up in the system, too, trained to want certain flowers on a predictable schedule and even to prefer blooms that sellers have found simplest to ship.



Amy is an accomplished California garden writer. As well as maintaining her own website, she holds forth with three blogging buddies from back East on the mischievous Garden Rant.

Her new book shows flower breeding, growing and sales as interlocking worlds, all three ruled by Dutch expertise. Horticulturists and traders from Holland have managed to rationalize the wonders and “dangerous speculation” of flowers and, despite the natural advantages of lands along the Equator, maintain their domination of the business.

One of the book’s finest chapters, excerpted in North Coast Journal, offers a stateside vignette of this process in the story of Leslie Woodriff, an eccentric lily breeder, and Ted Kirsch, the business partner who turned Woodriff’s hybrid Star Gazer lily into a commercial dynamo. This huge and fragrant white flower with the pink throat, Stewart writes, “stands at the crossroads between old fashioned plant breeders and modern hybridizers.” As the partnership between the two men sours, then dribbles into court, the once creative tension between haphazard experimentation and commercial genius unravels. Guess who comes out on top? (a Dutch company.)

imageShuttling flowers at Aalsmeer

Photo: Millikin University

With crisp style —and seemingly boundless interest in cargo docks and conveyor belts—Amy has a special gift for explanation. Whether describing how ethylene wilts a delphinium or the auction clocks wind down at Aalsmeer, she writes with verve.

Flower Confidential, in our view, is less engaging when Stewart shifts from description to persuasion. For example, Amy takes considerable pains to present the case for VeriFlora, a proposed certification system for flowers sold in the U.S. (Such systems, each with its own set of standards, are already used in parts of Europe, Africa, and South America). The goals of improving agricultural ecology and especially working conditions and rights for laborers in the flower industry are important. Too important, we believe, to entrust to growers, however well meaning they may be.

Stewart quotes Nora Ferm of the International Labor Rights Fund along these lines. “Ecuador needs the flower industry,” says Ferm. “It’s brought in a lot of jobs. And workers at a given plantation are better off than they were before the certification arrived. But some of these certifications come in and basically give a prize for complying with local laws. Well, they should all be complying with local laws…” It seems to us that strong legal requirements, and sanctions for companies that fail to meet them, stand the best chance of improving working conditions and protecting the environment.

imageWe will continue to enjoy and track down many of the fascinating details in Flower Confidential –  that the first, influential Japanese flowers growers in California couldn’t own their own land, that most of Ecuador’s premium roses sell in Russia, that HMOs have put a dent in flower deliveries to hospitals, that gerberas like only one inch of water, that there’s a flower superstore in Miami where you can stroll along color-sorted aisles of blossoms and make your own arrangement on the spot. Unfortunately, retrieving these particulars may be hard. There’s no index. With all this information – plus truckloads of figures and statistics— how could the publisher have failed to provide one?

Nearly a year ago, Amy began trickling out information about her book into the blogsphere, and with its release in January, Flower Confidential has received a shower of good coverage from media eager to fill the Valentine’s holiday news hole with something juicy. Amy, you’ve done it. Congratulations. And thank you for the light you’ve shone on the human wiles, will and labor behind our flowers.

(Check here for details of Amy’s upcoming readings and book signings -– to include our own Land of the Lotus Eaters, Austin, TX, on Friday, February 23.)

 

 



Posted by Julie on 02/22 at 01:18 PM
Art & MediaCut-Flower TradePermalink