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Sunday, May 04, 2008
'Confidential' Displays Flower Industry's Ugly Side
By Review By Suzanne Mantel
Flower Confidential by Amy Stewart
Algonquin Books, $13.95, 306 pp.
Flower Confidential, a behind-the-scenes look at the cut-flower industry, can be found in the gardening section of bookstores, but author Amy Stewart says it is not a gardening book.
It's the opposite of a gardening book, she says. It's about how cut flowers are not the flowers we grow in the garden.
In the new release, subtitled The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers, Stewart travels to rose megagrowers in Latin America and flower auctioneers in the Netherlands. She discovers that every rose leaving greenhouses in Ecuador is dipped in a fungicide banned for use on live plants in the U.S. She learns that a flower's energy can be devoted to longevity or to fragrance, and with shelf life so highly prized in stores, modern blooms rarely have much scent. And for those who have wondered why they're allowed only two pieces of checked luggage, she writes that the plane might need room in its belly for millions of flowers.
Cut flowers are part of the global marketplace, after all, and Stewart prompts shoppers to think hard about where their stems come from and how they got to market: The book may just get readers to see bouquets in a whole new light.
Speaking from a Denver stop in a book tour, Stewart reflected on how globalization has changed the cut-flower industry.
Many regional American growers have been devastated by the rise of farms in Latin America, where land and labor are cheap. Southern California, which had an edge because of its mild climate and long growing season, no longer can compete in roses, carnations and chrysanthemums. Growers have to be creative, looking for crops that can't be raised on foreign super-farms.
Local growers have more costs and more regulatory oversight than Latin American growers, Stewart says. They can often produce interesting varieties you won't get as an import.
Stewart, a Texas native with a voice sharp with clarity, lives in Northern California and writes about garden issues for various media. So when she laments the prosaic existence of most garden writers, she knows what she's talking about.
They get shunted to home decorating, but gardening is about how we interact with the plant kingdom and it's vitally important, not like decorating with pillows and candles, or giving five easy container tips for fall, she says.
Stewart singled out author Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire) for elevating the genre.
The challenge of course, is figuring out what story to tell. Flowers are a huge industry, so she immediately started to simplify. She looked for individual plants that would tell a bigger story and people who were willing to show her around and share their secrets.
This is part of an article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
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