Product Description

We buy more flowers a year than we do Big Macs, spending $6.2 billion annually. We use them to mark our most important events, to express sentiments that might otherwise go unsaid. And we demand perfection. So it’s no surprise that there is a $40 billion global industry devoted to making flowers flawless.

Amy Stewart takes us inside the flower trade—from the hybridizers, who create new varieties in the laboratory, to the growers, who produce flowers by the millions (often in a factory-like setting), to the Dutch auctioneers, who set the bar (and the price), and ultimately to the neighborhood florists orchestrating the mind-boggling demands of Valentine’s and Mother’s Day. There’s the breeder intent on developing the first blue rose; an eccentric horticultural legend who created the world’s most popular lily; a grower of gerberas of every color imaginable; and the equivalent of a Tiffany diamond: the “ Forever Young” rose.

Stewart explores the relevance of flowers in our lives and in our history, and in the process she reveals all that has been gained—and lost—by tinkering with nature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #94421 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-04
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 306 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Stewart, an avid gardener and winner of the 2005 California Horticultural Society's Writer's Award for her book The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms, now tackles the global flower industry. Her investigations take her from an eccentric lily breeder to an Australian business with the alchemical mission of creating a blue rose. She visits a romantically anachronistic violet grower, the largest remaining California grower of cut flowers and a Dutch breeder employing high-tech methods to develop flowers in equatorial countries where wages are low. Stewart follows a rose from the remote Ecuadoran greenhouse where it's grown to the American retailer where it's finally sold, and visits a huge, stock –exchange–like Dutch flower auction. These present-day adventures are interspersed with fascinating histories of the various aspects of flower culture, propagation and commerce. Stewart's floral romanticism—she admits early on that she's "always had a generalized, smutty sort of lust for flowers"—survives the potentially disillusioning revelations of the flower biz, though her passion only falters a few times, as when she witnesses roses being dipped in fungicide in preparation for export. By the end, this book is as lush as the flowers it describes. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Adrian Higgins

In an ideal world, we would buy cut flowers for a sweetheart's birthday from Teresa Sabankaya. From her green kiosk in Santa Cruz, Calif., she sells blooms that she has raised lovingly on her flower farm. Her flowers, held in buckets that crowd her stall, are "all interesting, unusual, old-fashioned, ephemeral, perfumy," Amy Stewart writes in her eye-opening new Flower Confidential. In summer, Sabankaya's customers grab larkspur and poppies; in winter, heathers and berried plants.

But this isn't how most American consumers get their flowers. Instead, our blooms are more likely to have been raised in high-altitude flower factories in Ecuador or Colombia, dunked in chemicals, flown to Miami and distributed to wholesale markets around the country. A rose cut on a Monday morning in the shadow of a snow-capped volcano might find its way to a Manhattan florist the following Friday, and then be good for a week or more with a little care. In your local supermarket, you will find roses completely devoid of fragrance -- pretty in a stiff and uniform sort of way, but not the earthy roses of the garden or Sabankaya's stall.

Indeed, readers of Flower Confidential will be surprised and appalled to learn the extent to which something as fleeting and romantic as a rose or a lily has been turned into an industrial widget. You might accept today that a desk fan or a flashlight has been made somewhere other than in the United States, but a flower? An old Irish song speaks of the last rose of summer "left blooming alone." But today, there is no last rose of summer, nor a first rose of spring -- just roses spewing forth continuously from the jet-age conveyor belt of floriculture. Stewart believes these roses are enchanting as a single bouquet, a personal expression of caring. But force us to look at the machinery of this mass production, as she does so well, and the feeling is a little more queasy.

Consider some statistics gathered by Stewart:

We consume 10 million cut flowers per day in the United States.

On a per capita basis, we still spend considerably less in a year on flowers than Europeans do -- $25.90 compared to, say, more than $70 in Norway or $100 in Switzerland.

Twelve years ago, there were 100 carnation growers in the United States; now there are 24.

While America's rose production has declined by almost three quarters in the past 12 years, it has soared in places such as Colombia, Ecuador and Kenya.

We buy most of our flowers at the grocery store, but we spend the most money when we order from independent florists struggling to maintain their retail foothold.

All of this reminds us that not even a flower is simple. Delving into the broader world of horticulture leaves one astonished by the complexity of how, say, a petunia arrives at the garden center. This humble flower is backed by a global labyrinth of breeders, seed companies, growers, marketers, sales representatives and shippers. The machinations of floriculture are made even more poignant by the fact that the moment a flower is cut, it begins to die. So flowers are for the moment, which raises their value as a currency of human sentiment. Creating them is a far less poetic affair.

Flowers are not just picked from the wild; each lily or amaryllis is hybridized for particular, commercially viable traits by specialists who devote their lives to doing so. Flower Confidential shows us the original breeder of the ubiquitous Stargazer lily, an eccentric and sad figure who failed to cash in on the flower's success. But Stewart, who writes regularly for Organic Gardening magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle, also reports on the sophisticated efforts to raise tulips, gerberas and lilies by one of California's remaining cut-flower producers, Sun Valley Floral Farms. It is run by a grower named Lane DeVries, who left his native Netherlands to build the enterprise into America's largest producer of cut flowers. The Dutch influence in the industry is pervasive and legendary. Stewart shows us the daily flower auction at Aalsmeer, a vast concrete complex near Amsterdam that is the major global market for cut flowers and potted plants -- a rather cold and soulless place for so beautiful a commodity.

The Dutch auctions are still vital to floriculture, but the shift in actual growing -- especially in the western hemisphere -- is to the Andes, a region of optimum cultivation conditions and cheap labor. Stewart draws a picture of Ecuador's flower industry that is alternately disturbing and encouraging. Human rights groups worry about nursery workers who receive just $150 a month and endure difficult conditions, including exposure to chemicals banned in the United States. Stewart also cites problems with sexual harassment and child labor. But as with some foodstuffs, retailers and consumers can now choose "green label" flowers whose growers pledge to look after their workers and the environment.

Stewart's journey takes us down many such paths, all connected by her own curiosity and highly readable prose. The greatest value of Flower Confidential, however, is that it was written at all. We know so little of the ways simple daily items are brought to us that such a book helps us grasp our modern world. Who knows? Flower Confidential may compel us to return to something purer, more local. It may send us in search of our own version of Teresa Sabankaya's flower kiosk.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Amy Stewart's previous books, the award-winning The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms and From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden (see below), testify to the author's fascination with dirtying her hands. The well-researched and exuberantly written Flower Confidential reveals her passion and her eye for the interesting statistic (Americans buy some 10 million cut flowers a day). Stewart does an admirable job of making sense of a complicated business, even if a lack of illustrations might be limiting. Nevertheless (and above all), the book adeptly celebrates the incomparable beauty embodied in Stewart's subject—and "may compel us to return to something purer, more local" (Washington Post).
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Who knew flowers were so interesting?
This book is a fascinating look at the flower industry. I've looked at especially beautiful cut flowers before and wondered where they came from and how they got them quite so perfect, but I had no idea how complex the answer would be.

This was a real page-turner from beginning to end, and it had me wishing that I lived near Miami, glad I live near San Francisco and its Flower Mart, planning a trip to Arcata, CA in July, reminding my boyfriend to get me that Costco membership and wanting to buy myself some flowers every week (and feeling much more knowledgeable about doing so.) She starts out at the San Francisco Flower Mart and it sounds so impressive...60 vendors, wow! But, by the end of the book, when she gets to the Dutch Flower Auction, the Flower Mart seems downright puny and probably lacking in the more high end flowers from the international market.

The one thing that disappointed me a bit about this book was the pictures. Ms. Stewart talks about taking photos several times in the book and I wanted to see them. There are some interesting line drawings in the book, and each section has a grainy black and white photo at the beginning (for a total of four photos) but I wanted more. Well, it turns out her website, amystewart.com, has all the big color pictures that were missing from the book, so I suggest checking it out after or during reading the book.

I am in the middle of planting/planning a vegetable garden right now, but this book had me wishing a little bit that I was planting a rose garden instead. I can see how one could never grow flowers at home that were as "perfect" as what a commercial grower can do, but Amy Stewart just got me so excited about flowers. I think now I'll read her book "From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden", and hopefully get as excited about the vegetable garden.

If you enjoy the part of the book that talks about the history of the Dutch and their "world domination via the tulip", then you may want to also check out the book "The Botany of Desire" by Michael Pollan.

I almost wrote to the author!
I loved this book so much. I am not a gardener but was an aspiring florist when I ran across this at my library. Read it quickly and thought it was fascinating and well written. I am also impressed with the amount of research she did to get all of the information and the amount of travel she endured to find out first hand how things worked.

When I finally did happen across a florist job in the shop I had always wanted to work in, I came in knowing little about design, but alot about the industry. I am always able to tell someone something that they didn't know. And it was even more exciting to actually open up a flower delivery and know about the company that they came from and how things are done there.

I almost wrote to the author to tell her how much I loved the book, but of course never got around to it. So if she reads this, Thank You Amy! In fact, I received the hardback book this past Christmas as a gift (I wonder how my MIL knew I wanted it! Hee, Hee.)

I highly recommend this book to anyone who runs or works in a shop, and also to those people who just like to know how things work. There really is much more involved than I think most people realize. Great Job Amy!

Wierd title, great book
When I saw Amy Stewart's name on a new book I had to have it. I enjoyed her book about earthworms so much that I didn't think she could match it, but I was wrong. This is a wonderful expose of the flower trade around the world. From Holland to South America she tracked down the progress of cut flowers from their hybridizing to the final sale. It all has the ring of truth - that sense that the research was thorough, that nothing was skimped, and aspects of the flower business were presented whole cloth as well as facts being recorded and shared.
Last year I saw roses grown in Ecuador for markets continents away. I read about Dole closing down huge flower-growing greenhouses in poor towns where that was the only source of income. In our hacienda were bouquets of roses enormous beyond belief. Amy Stewart's book places this into perspective for me within the whole world of the flower industry.
In slaking her own curiosity about the natural world, this writer helps us understand our world better. This book is not just about flowers, or even the natural world - it is also about international trade, politics, business affairs and economic and social issues.
An excellent package. I can't wait for her next book.