Flower Power

According to Amy Stewart, the ultimate struggle of every commercial flower grower is to make a mass-produced commercial product meet the typical buyer’s standards, which are really quite high: We require our flowers to be unique, long lasting, and robust yet still appear natural, gentle, and fragrant. It doesn’t matter to us how long the flowers have been cut and without water, or how far they’ve traveled through various climates and hands before arriving at the florist or supermarket where we find them. We demand perfection when the flower at last reaches its final destination—the vase.
For hundreds of years, technology has been advancing to help growers meet these demands. Proof of a sophisticated floral trade and an advancing methodology has been documented in Roman Egypt, where some florists’ business correspondence had been found scribbled on papyrus. Today most breeding involves gene splitting under a microscope and is performed in sterile laboratories. Cut flowers are now bred for longer vase-life, stronger stems, little or no pollen residue, and larger vibrant blossoms.
“The supreme irony of cut flower breeding,” Stewart says, “lies in the fact that we use all the science and technology available to us to make a flower stop acting like a flower. But no one can change the fact that a flower exists for just one purpose: to reproduce and die.”
Although there are many elements to consider for successful blossom production, one of the most significant is a concept called photoperiod, which was discovered in the 1920s by two scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Their experiments proved that plants could be broken into three categories depending on the number of hours of daylight required to initiate blooming. A short-day plant needs day lengths that are 13 hours or less, a long-day would require at least 14 hours or more, and a day-neutral is not specifically influenced by daylight at all.
Flower growers face the same issues as the rest of the agriculture industry: immigrant labor, pesticide regulations and restrictions, and ever-growing international competition.
The idea was refined by later scientists, who found that flowering is actually regulated by night length no matter how many hours of daylight it gets, a flower cannot bloom unless it also receives sufficient amounts of time in the dark. Today, a widely used classification system allows growers to create artificial days of twenty or thirty hours in length. By regulating the day and night length, growers have the ability to produce bloom on demand.
Depending on the plant, a flower may blossom several times before needing to be replaced. But in commercial settings, a bulb has “just one shot, one season to make its mark. It is not cost effective for [the grower] to coddle a bulb along year after year as its productivity declines, so after it blooms once, it gets tossed on the compost pile and a fresh bulb arrives to take its place.” Although quite a morbid thought for flower lovers everywhere, including Stewart, this makes fine business sense.
The book points out that flower growers face the same issues as the rest of the agriculture industry: immigrant labor, pesticide regulations and restrictions, and ever-growing international competition. “Cut flowers in the United States are an endangered species…with [imports now making up] nearly 80 percent of all flowers purchased nationwide.” With many Latin American and African countries having ideal weather conditions year-round, laxer restrictions on pesticide use, and an abundance of cheap labor that lets them harvest flowers at a lower cost per stem, it is not surprising that Stewart and many others are uncertain of the future prosperity of domestic business. It is disappointing that Stewart does not offer suggestions of her own for how to save the domestic industry.
Flowers headed for market are cut prematurely to guarantee that full bloom occurs only in the hands of the paying customer, typically four to five days later. By keeping the cut flowers in the cold and dark, the aging process is slowed down significantly and the buds are prevented from opening or spoiling.
If the flowers are being imported into the U.S., they must also pass a thorough inspection for pests and plant diseases. If even the smallest trace of either is found, the entire shipment must either be dumped or fumigated right there in the airport. Since flowers are not monitored for pesticide use as foods are, it has become a competitive advantage for many international growers to use the maximum amount of pesticide to prevent any further delays or an increase in their costs. Stewart even recalls her first hand experience with watching Latin American growers dip each cut flower from bud to stem in a large vat of pesticide prior to shipping. It certainly makes one want to resist the familiar urge to lean into a beautiful bouquet and inhale deeply.
Stewart’s book closes with the debate over threats to florists posed by wholesalers and supermarkets that can sell cut flower arrangement at the lower prices consumers demand. She says the special verve that florists bring to their arrangements will protect the industry. But it’s hard to imagine, over time, that we will be without machines that could quickly and without error gather and arrange the flowers according to any request, resulting in a product that would be significantly less expensive. There will be a continued need for a venue to sell them. Perhaps her own enthusiasm for the flower business stops Stewart from acknowledging this reality.
It is also interesting that Stewart does not consider the possibility that the decline of florists and cut-flower businesses may be due to the fact that many consumers now buy potted plant arrangements in lieu of flowers, which still express the sentiments and emotions provided by cut flowers, but also offers a longer-term of enjoyment for the money.
Flower Confidential provides extensive, intriguing information on the business of flowers, if not anything the average consumer will need to think about before grabbing the next bouquet off the shelf. As a $40 billion worldwide luxury industry, it seems clear that the flower trade will survive in some form long into the future.
Keri Ann Lutz is a summa cum laude graduate of the College of Notre Dame of Maryland and the business & circulation manager at The American.