"Flower Confidential" | A thorny love affair

"Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers"
by Amy Stewart
Algonquin Books, 306 pp., $23.95

In her previous book, "The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms," Northern California writer/gardener Amy Stewart put a relatively unnoticed, ostensibly simple life form into the spotlight, where she revealed how much we take for granted beneath our own two feet. In her new book, "Flower Confidential," Stewart once again succeeds in surprising and educating us, for what could seem more romantically simple than flowers, nature's perfect messengers for so many forms of human communication and passion? Today's multibillion-dollar international flower trade turns out to be considerably more complicated.

Ever since one person gave another even a single blossom, whether to express affection or regret, appreciation or sympathy, the gesture has triggered quests for something bigger, brighter, newer — blue roses! black tulips! peonies with hundreds of petals! mums bigger than dinner plates! — and urged us on, past the simple act of stooping to pick a handful of seasonal wildflowers or something prized and lovingly nurtured in our own backyards.

These days, Stewart writes, growers have been supplanted by geneticists who manipulate hybrids and try to anticipate the demands of the ever-changing floral industry's fads, for cut flowers are a $40 billion business worldwide. Americans buy about 10 million flowers daily — that's even more blooms than Big Macs — spending an average of $25 yearly. (We are cheapskates compared to the Swiss, whose $100 per capita annually spent on posies is the highest in the world.) Only 22 percent of these flowers are grown in the States now, with far more imported from Colombia and Ecuador, where workers earn about $150 per month. Or, in another way of putting it, they make less than four cents for every rose sold here — and for the most part lack employee benefits, overtime, adequate safety standards or restrictions on child labor.

Once you start to look more closely at the flower business via Stewart's fascinating travels and research, a rose by any other name has either lost its scent entirely (engineered, rather, to withstand harvesting, packing and shipping — and becoming about as fragrant as styrofoam) or smells less sweet (sometimes scents are applied artificially).

Beginning with her early-morning visit to the San Francisco Flower Market where traders begin their day at about 3 a.m., then moving on to flower farms in California and South America and Holland, Stewart introduces complex, behind-the-scene details that almost no one in the flower-buying public could imagine.

If you think flowers still grow outdoors or even in dirt, think again. Don Garibaldi, a third-generation violet grower on the California coast near San Francisco, is one of the last in the world to raise field-grown violets. The cool, misty climate is perfect for his crop. And while Washington state's famous Skagit tulip fields and annual festival may seem to celebrate the glorious flowers, the real business, the major part of the iceberg out of sight underwater, is the trade in bulbs.

Greenhouses, refrigeration and rapid methods of transportation meant flowers could be grown anywhere, and so they are: gerberas in Holland, carnations in Colorado, roses in Ecuador. When we buy a bouquet, whether from a supermarket or florist or even from the nation's fifth largest flower seller, Costco, that mixed bunch's origins — the various types of flowers often find their ways into that cellophane sleeve from many different locations — are usually a mystery.

Eighty-eight percent arrive at Miami International Airport, but "unlike fruits and vegetables, flowers are not tested for illegal pesticide residue. After all, they're not going to be eaten. That creates a situation in which growers have an incentive to use the maximum amount of pesticides to eliminate the possibility of a single gnat turning up in a box." In Ecuador, Stewart visited a rose growing facility where bunches were "dipped, blossom first, into a barrel of fungicide to prevent botrytis ... "

Fortunately, however, times are changing. "Organic" flowers — those produced by methods eco-friendly not only to the environment but also to the workers — are gaining ground. If you're curious about the flowers you give or receive, Stewart's book is the perfect place to start.

Irene Wanner sold her Seattle home in 2006, trading a tiny garden for 12.5 acres of sand, pinyon, juniper and cactus in New Mexico's Jemez Mountains.