Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: plant patent, certified flowers, lily breeding, Flower Confidential, Sun Valley, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 306 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books; First Edition edition (January 4, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565124383
• ISBN-13: 978-1565124387
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #379,198 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Behind the greenhouse door, March 29, 2007

By	Douglas E. Welch "Podcaster/Tech Geek" (Van Nuys, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

How much thought do you give to those flowers you pass in the grocery store aisle? Do you know where your Valentine's Day roses came from or how they got to you? For most of us, we don't know, nor rather care, but thankfully author, Amy Stewart does.

In Flower Confidential (Algonquin Books, 2007), Stewart takes us deep inside the huge and profitable business of flowers. From a lily grower in the American Northwest, to the rose fields of Ecuador she introduces us to the people, places and plants that travel all over the world to supply our human need for colorful and almost too perfect flowers.

Flower Confidential is a fun romp around the world that also holds some deep concerns. The treatment of the workers in the fields and greenhouses is an on-going issue no matter where the author visits. She also discusses how the need for a "perfect" flower that travels well and lasts long in the vase has removed their scent. It also puts us in danger of producing yet another industry focused on lowest-common denominator, where each flower looks begins to look much like every other flower.

Stewart's writing takes us along on her travels, describing people and plants alike in a visual style that gives us an understanding of who they are and what they are trying to accomplish. We feel the sense of amazement as she visits the Miami airport center where the majority of flowers enter the US. I particularly felt her desire to scoop up armloads of flowers or save those consigned to the compost heaps.

Immerse yourself in the little-known of flowers and the people who grow them. You will develop a new-found respect for what both suffer to provide that perfect arrangement for your dining room table.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars the flip side of all that loveliness, June 1, 2007

By	L. Brown (Nashville, TN) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As a flower junkie and floral designer, I was vaguely aware of the flower industry's workings, but this book spelled it all out pretty clearly for me. The Big Idea I have taken away from this is that we the flower-buying public need to demand quality, cleanliness and sustainability from the flower industry in the same way we are coming to demand it from those who supply our food. "Fair trade" is a phrase most Americans associate with coffee-- we should expect similar standards with respect to the flowers we purchase as well. All that loveliness should not come at the expense of the health of those producing it or of the integrity of the environment.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bereft of seeds and color, April 15, 2007

By	Jere Sanborn (Devon, PA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amy Stewart has shown admirable talent in her chronicle of the flower industry as the story proceeds globally from lab to grower to consumer; her ability to inform and entertain the reader is considerable. But she has left out completely an important part of the floral research and development business...the production of flower seed, most notably in Lompoc, CA, the world's leader in seed production.

Moreover, a fair review cannot overlook those horrible photographs preceeding the book's introduction, epilogue, and each of it's three parts; these look as though lifted straight from a 1950's era Soviet high
school textbook. For a book infused with the passion of the floral palette, color is sorely missing.