Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

Flower Confidential by Amy Stewart is a fascinating look inside the flower business. I love books like this that give an indepth look into hidden worlds that operate beyond our normal ken. Stewart includes great tidbits that are perfect pieces of trivia for tossing around: bees can't see red. But the real charm of this book is her own passion for flowers and how it leads her to travel the world in search of the truth behind where the flowers we buy come from. She takes us from a flower farm in California to greenhouses in Ecuador to the famous Dutch auction houses. Each place comes to life through her detailed witty descriptions. The sad tale of the creation of the Star Gazer lily and the fight for the rights to it is compelling drama. Stewart gives the history of breeding and selling flowers up to the current gene-splicing in the current quest for a truly blue rose. Her tantalizing descriptions of flowers led me to keep the laptop open next to me so I could see each flower for myself. She brings up excellent questions about where and how flowers should be grown and what we as consumers should expect. Stewart covers organic flowers and worker conditions as well as describing the odd and often unpoetic ways in which these flowers are grown. Fantastic read!

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.

When you go to the supermarket and see groceries, most of us have at least a basic understanding of from where and how the food came to be there, such as the fields where crops grew, ranches where livestock were raised, slaughterhouses, processing facilities, etc. But how many times have most of us thought about flowers? Especially considering just how short a period of time there is between when a flower is picked, when it is displayed in our homes, and when it finally wilts, there are an amazing number of processes and work involved in flowers. Travelling around the world, from the "design" stage (yes, you'll read about how flowers are "engineered") to planting, to selling, to transportation, to marketing, all the way to the florist's shop or the supermarket, Stewart covers it all. You'll even learn a lot about some of the "allied" professions in the flower trade, like logistics, retailing, biotechnology, and more. And best of all, the book is written in a very easy to read style. If you have any interest in flowers and/or you just like learning about how things work, then I wholeheartedly recommend this book to you.

Did you ever read Anthony Bourdain's book "Kitchen Confidential" which is a sort of tell-all and autobiographical book of what goes on behind the swinging doors in restaurants. It's hilarious, sarcastic, etc. In its own way, Flower Confidential achieves the same greatness, just by its thoroughness in showing us what 'really' goes on. In a way, this is even more relevant, because we all have an idea of how a restaurant works, but no one thinks about how that bouquet came to be.

In addition to being able to spew off tons of facts about flowers to people (I can't tell if they're impressed or just think I'm crazy), this book has made me more conscious of the practices that go on and how to support ethical labor and fertilizating companies. I can't tell you how excited I was one day when I was in Sam's Club looking at their flowers, and yes, the Fair Trade sticker was there! I was happy to see it, and I was also glad that I knew what that sticker symbolized.

The book came out at an interesting time-right when Columbia and Ecuador (two major growers) were fighting each other. Every time I heard about the war, I always wondered what happened to the flower farms.

This book is honest, captivating, and is a great look at a very interesting industry. I'm amazed how much effort is put in to such a simple, cheap thing that we don'e even really think about. For me, whenever I get flowers, I'll ALWAYS be thinking about where they came from.

As an opinionated garden columnist, who preaches organic gardening to anyone who will listen . . . I was thrilled to read a book that finally tells the true story behind the floral industry. The system is ridiculous and needs drastic change. This will only happen when flower consumers are educated enough to see what their purchases are doing to the soil and to the farmers and their families, who work amongst toxic pesticides just so we can have a nice, long-lasting, unscented, superficial flower on our table.
Plus, the book is beautifully written.
AMEN AMY!

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.

Amy Stewart joins the ranks of other authors who make the everyday fascinating. Dava Sovel made the concept of "longitude" captivating. Kurlansky made everyday "Salt" capitvating. Michael Pollan took on the mundane subjects of gardening and eating and turned them into page-turners as well as thought-provoking, life-changing events. In her second book, Amy Stewart made "Worms" seem monumental in "The Earth Moved..." and now she takes on the grocery store flower in ways that will make you stop and think. If you enjoy thinking about things that most people take for granted, read "Flower Confidential" and you will never see that bouquet of flowers in the supermarket the same again.

I just recently read Flower Confidential and found it fascinating. I wasn't surprised to enjoy it so much, as some years ago I read another book by this author, From the Ground Up: The story of a first garden, and was quite impressed.
Amy Stewart does a fine job of exploring the mega business of cut flowers, the huge decline of growers here in the US, the explosion of growers in other countries...the ins and outs of it all. I expect Flower Confidential would be of interest to most people who are passionate gardeners, especially to those who have a real interest in the propagation of plants.
But the main thing is that the writing is so good. I am a garden writer myself, and although I've never met this author, reading her books makes me feel I'd like her a lot, as though we could easily be friends. Amy Stewart writes about plants in a beautiful, down to earth manner, lucky for those of us who like to read about plants...but I suspect she could write about almost anything she cared about, and the results would be excellent.
If you haven't read any of her books, do check them out...I figure you're in for a treat. Highly recommended.