Organic flower industry growing, focusing on unusual varieties

Like florists all over the country, Terra Bella Flowers in Greenwood spent this week wrangling red roses.

Long-stemmed beauties from Ecuador stood in bins on the floor while arrangers' fingers flew to assemble bouquets for Valentine's Day this weekend.

Unlike most florists, Terra Bella's roses come with a string of credentials. They are certified by Veriflora, Flor Ecuador, Fair Labor Practices and the Flower Label Program.

They are "eco-roses" — not quite organic, but grown with fewer pesticides than your average flower.

"I grew up in a farming community where we had to close the windows when they were going to spray, so it's something I've always been aware of," said Terra Bella owner Melissa Feveyear.

Some of her flowers are certified organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, just like organic milk or broccoli. It's a growing market, with sales more than doubling to $42 million between 2005 and 2008, according to the Organic Trade Association.

But it remains a narrow slice of the $6.6 billion in U.S. retail florist sales, and many eco-friendly flower growers cannot afford the organic label.

Florists like Feveyear who want to avoid flowers grown with artificial fertilizers and pesticides use other labels like Veriflora that set limits on chemicals, largely to ensure that farmworkers are treated well.

Eco-friendly florists also build relationships with local growers, whose farms they can visit and who share details about their growing practices.

Aside from February, when customers demand red roses, eco-friendly florists tend to offer an unusual assortment of flowers not found on the global market.

Often, their customers do not even know they are eco-friendly.

They certainly would not know based on price. Feveyear figures the cost of eco-friendly flowers — to her and her customers — is about 10 percent higher, "if that," she said, because the wholesale flower market is so competitive.

Katherine Anderson, owner of a small flower farm called Marigold and Mint near Carnation, plans to open shop in April at an indoor market at 1531 Melrose Ave. on Capitol Hill.

She counts on customers valuing the fact that her flowers are local, something that means even more to her than being eco-friendly.

"It's more important to me that a flower wasn't cut in South Africa and had to go through Holland to get to Seattle for a wedding," Anderson said. "A lot of florists now buy off auctions, because they can get 10-cent roses and sell them really cheap to their customers on Capitol Hill."

She figures the organic-flower movement is about five years behind organic food.

"It's obvious why you'd want pesticide-free food, but it's not as obvious why it's important in your flowers," Anderson said.

She has seen indications of a budding organic-flower trend during the past couple of years in the growing popularity of "green weddings," celebrities favoring organic flowers, and big magazines like Martha Stewart Living mentioning an online organic flower seller.

Anderson and other eco-friendly growers in Washington lean toward flower varieties that do not ship well, minimizing the threat from big flower importers like Colombia and Ecuador.

"We can't compete with commodity crops on 40,000 acres. We grow on four acres, total," said Diane Szukovathy, who owns Jello Mold Farm near Mount Vernon with her husband, Dennis Westphall.

"We don't grow the same things, that's how we get around it," Szukovathy said. The farm's biggest sellers include phlox, dahlias and sunflowers.

There is disagreement, even among growers, about whether organic and eco-friendly flowers last longer than their conventional counterparts.

Some say they hold up better because they have not spent days in shipment and are hardier specimens from having fought off pests without artificial assistance. Others disagree, but say consumers need to get used to the natural longevity of a bloom.

Their fragrance draws less controversy.

Even customers like Sam Stabler, who buys flowers from Terra Bella mostly because they make his girlfriend happy, smells the difference.

"I notice they're more fragrant than when I buy flowers at QFC," said Stabler, assistant manager of Neptune Coffee, which is next door to the florist.

It's just as well that florists not make a big deal of being organic, said Melissa Abbott, the trends and culinary insights manager at the Hartman Group, a market-research firm in Bellevue that studies the organic and food movements.

"If you're at the store and you're going to pick up flowers for the kitchen table, it's already perceived as bringing something natural into the home," Abbott said. An organic label "would seem like a marketing ploy."

People likely to appreciate organic flowers are highly aware of organics and sustainability in general, she said.

For the rest, Abbott said, "the idea that you'd have to buy organic flowers brings up more concerns about the flower industry itself."

— Melissa Allison

Starbucks has replaced McDonald's as the coffee sponsor of Fashion Week in New York, Crain's New York Business reported. The chains don't disclose how much they pay to participate, but Crain's said Starbucks is serving Frappuccino Lite. — MA

REI has named Stephen Lockhart, an anesthesiologist and chief medical officer at the East Bay region of Sutter Health in Northern California, to its 12-member board of directors. Lockhart, who lives in Oakland, Calif., and has been an REI member since 1997, takes the place of Ivar Chhina, who left the board to become REI's chief financial officer last year.

— AM

Retail Report appears Fridays. Amy Martinez covers goods, services and online retail. She can be reached at 206-464-2923 or amartinez@seattletimes.com. Melissa Allison covers the food and beverage industry. She can be reached at 206-464-3312 or mallison@seattletimes.com.