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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers Deborah Jean Warner (bio) Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers. By Amy Stewart . Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2007 Pp. 306. $23.95. Leslie Woodruff, the first character we meet in Amy Stewart's delightful book, was a crusty Californian who hybridized flowers the old-fashioned way. By brushing the pollen of one flower onto the stamen of another and waiting to see what emerged from the ground, he managed to combine the upright stance of Asiatic lilies with the bold color and fragrance of Oriental lilies. His Star Gazer lily was patented in 1976 and, because it went well in floral arrangements and had a long vase life and good shipping characteristics, it became the best-selling lily of all time. Some thirty-six million stems are sold every year through the Dutch auctions alone. After a short account of open-air growing, Stewart describes large greenhouses where each blossom is looked on as a unit of profit. Because [End Page 293] flower purchases are incredibly seasonal—Valentine's Day and Mother's Day being the biggest floral events of the year—growers keep tight control of their plants by such means as constricting the buds and varying the length of the daily darkness. At Sun Valley in California, the largest flower farm in the United States, most of the workers are Latinos, and at Terra Nigra in the Netherlands, most of the workers are Poles. Chemicals are an important part of the process but, because they are expensive and because of environmental concerns, the large growers strive to minimize their use. In Equador, however, the pressure to produce perfect flowers has led to a host of perhaps unanticipated problems: workers now earn a steady salary but no longer have time to grow their own foodstuffs, and the use of chemicals puts strains on the environment. The emergence of flower farms in Colombia and Equador, incidentally, was a direct consequence of the American government's offer of tax advantages for farmers who grew things other than coca. In the third section, Stewart takes us to the Miami Airport, through which pass 88 percent of the cut flowers that come into the United States and where they are inspected, for bugs and contraband, by representatives of the Department of Homeland Security. We then visit the great Dutch flower market at Aaslmeer with its descending auction—the price drops until someone is ready to bid—and several local florist shops in the United States. Along the way, Stewart explains that many flowers are dipped into a fungicide just before shipment, and so one might think twice before smelling floral bouquets. On the other hand, because scent uses energy that might otherwise go into looks, most commercial flowers are scentless. This book is not a history of technology, but it does make a convincing argument that the flower industry is enormous and international, and that the process of developing and growing flowers, and delivering them to our local florists and grocery stores, involves a great deal of sophisticated science and technology. It should, therefore, encourage historians of technology to pay more attention to this and other parts of the natural world. According to JSTOR, Technology and Culture has published nothing on cut flowers and next to nothing on flowers of any sort. Deborah Jean Warner Deborah Warner, whose day job is curator of physical sciences at the National Museum of American History, spends many happy hours watering and weeding her gardens. Copyright © 2007 The Society for the History of Technology