Excerpt
Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers
Introduction
“What’s the first thing a person does when you hand them flowers?” Bob Otsuka, general manager of the San Francisco Flower Mart, asked me. To answer his own question, he pantomimed the gesture people make, bringing his hands to his face and breathing deeply.
“They smell them,” he said.
I sniffed the air, trying to catch the fragrance of rose or lily. Nothing. Sixty vendors sell cut flowers and plants out of this warehouse off Market Street, and as Bob and I walked the concrete floor a little after five a.m., neither one of us could find a blossom with a scent.
“These flowers have all been bred for the industry,” Bob said. “They’re selecting for color and size, and most of all for durability. You make some trade-offs when you do that. One of the things these flowers lose is scent.”
“But you know what?” he said as we continued down the hall past carts loaded with buckets of hydrangeas and sunflowers. “People still want to believe that flowers smell good. I’ve seen somebody put their face right into a bunch of ‘Leonidas’ and say, ‘Oh, they smell wonderful.’ But I know that rose. It’s got gold petals with coppery edges, you know the one I mean? It was bred for fall weddings. And it doesn’t have any fragrance at all.”
He shook his head, laughing, and I followed him down to the end of the hall, where he thought we might find some lilies that still had scent.
The first thing you notice about a flower market is how out of place it seems in a big city. Even in San Francisco, a sunny, breezy, laid-back metropolis where people are not shy about wearing flowers in their hair or anyplace else where one might fit, the idea of a flower market is just not in keeping with the grime and grit of urban life. Unlike the fishing industry, which has found a way to operate within the theme park environment of Fisherman’s Wharf, the flower trade is tucked away from the public eye in a warehouse district along the freeway. The market itself is nothing but a big boxy warehouse surrounded by trucks jockeying for position at the loading bays.
Arriving before dawn, with no prospect of coffee in the near future, makes the place seem even more rough and grim. Once you manage to swerve around the trucks and nose into the parking garage, you might find yourself sitting in the car, as I did, savoring a couple more seconds of warmth from the heater, wondering what it was that possessed you to get up at such an unholy hour and drive in the dark to this industrial neighborhood.
But then you make it across the parking garage, you walk down the stairs, and you push open a heavy metal door and just stand there, blinking in the sudden light, with your mouth hanging open. Inside is Disneyland. Oz. Santa’s toy shop. This, your sleep- and caffeine-deprived mind tells you, is where flowers come from.
Hundreds of snapdragons wheel past on a metal hand cart. Thousands of carnations sit in buckets. Roses are bunched just the way they left the farm, with each bud wrapped in a little piece of tissue. There are gardenia corsages. Artificially dyed chrysanthemums. Orchids from Thailand. Tulips from Holland. Lilies from Colombia. Ginger blossoms from Hawaii. Silk magnolias. Dried larkspur. Wreaths, houseplants, vases, baskets, ribbons, greens. It’s all here. It’s overpowering and bright and gorgeous. The trade floor is bustling with buyers and sellers who seem oblivious to the fact that it’s five o’clock in the morning and they’ve already been at work for two hours.
Another handcart wheels by, this one carrying more lilies of the valley than you’ve ever seen in one place. A short, dark-haired guy in a suit is running alongside, negotiating a price. Imagine Wall Street in the garden of Eden.
I had talked Bob into showing me around before dawn, when I knew the market was only open to the trade, because for years I’d been curious about how the place operated. I also wanted to see the good flowers, the ones that got snapped up before they let the public in at ten o’clock. Many of the vendors didn’t even bother sticking around until ten—they packed up and headed out of the city before the average San Franciscan was out of bed.
There were prurient interests at stake here, too: I’ve always had a very generalized, smutty sort of lust for flowers, and this was one more opportunity to get near them. It almost didn’t matter what was for sale that day—I knew I would want whatever they had. Wild poppies, hothouse roses, and dime store carnations—whatever it is, I’ll take it. I was enormously frustrated at having to keep my cash in my pocket as I strolled around without the badge that I would have needed to make a wholesale purchase. I would have happily spent the grocery money on flowers that day, if only they had let me.
Bob was a friendly guide, trading jokes with the growers and dismissing the most outrageous rumors about the trade with a wave of his hand. Hydrangeas stolen from shrubs in Golden Gate Park and sold to wholesalers through some kind of floral black market? Yeah, maybe. But then the volunteers at the park got smart and started making a little mark with a Sharpie at the base of every blossom, and that put a stop to it. Fistfights on the market floor when one vendor drops the price of roses and forces everyone else to follow suit? Well, not fistfights. Not exactly. But close.
I followed Bob around, thinking, they do all this for flowers. Airplanes fly in from Bogotá and trucks drive from Miami and acres of greenhouses get built and billions of dollars change hands. All that for the alstroemerias you pick up at the grocery store as an afterthought. All that for the delphiniums you send to the hospital to cheer up your sister. All that for the violets on a grave, the carnation in your buttonhole.
There’s an inherent contradiction in offering flowers up for sale, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and I hoped that getting close to the action would help explain it. Finally, I realized what it was: flowers are like nothing else that we buy. They don’t play by the same rules. For one thing, they are basically free. You can pick a flower by the side of the road. You can grow one in your garden for next to nothing. A flower is as perishable as a piece of fruit, but less practical—you can’t eat it, after all. Put a rose in a vase and it’ll be dead in a week. That’s all you get for your money. In spite of this, the cut flower market is worth forty billion dollars worldwide. Breeders pour big money into building a better flower: one that lasts longer in the vase, one that doesn’t drop petals or shed pollen, one that meets the peculiar demands of fall brides or supermarket shoppers.
The floral trade itself—the business end of our relationship with cut flowers—has ancient origins. Consider this letter:
“Roses are not yet in full bloom here—in fact they are scarce—and from all the nurseries and all the garland-weavers we could just barely get together the thousand that we sent you…even with picking the ones that ought not to have been picked till tomorrow. We had all the narcissi you wanted, so instead of the two thousand you asked for we sent four thousand.”
This ordinary bit of business correspondence could have been written last week, but in fact it was scribbled on papyrus in Roman Egypt and dates to shortly before the birth of Christ. Imagine: flowers were already grown in fields, ordered in bulk, and shipped by the thousands in hopes that they would arrive in time for a party or a holiday. The most modern rose grower can sympathize with the problem of having to pick roses before they are quite ready. This anonymous, ancient tradesman probably worried, just as rose growers do today, that blossoms picked at this stage will never open in the vase and will leave his customers unsatisfied.
The Romans developed a sophisticated flower trade, complete with all the taxation, accounting, and logistical issues that accompany any commercial enterprise. They knew how to force flowers to bloom early by pumping steam or hot water past them. They attempted greenhouses with thin walls of mica and used wheeled carts to move plants in and out of the sun. And as soon as these artificial means of cultivating flowers developed, along came their critics, who saw the floral trade as a bit unnatural, given the way it used technology to stay out of step with the seasons. It makes me uncomfortable to see sunflowers for sale at Christmas, so far from their summer season, and I am not alone—the Roman playwright and philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca wrote this in the first century AD: “Do not men live contrary to Nature who crave roses in winter or seek to raise a spring flower like a lily by means of hot-water heaters and artificial changes of temperature?”
The cut flower trade is all about this struggle between what is natural and unspoiled, and what is mass-produced and commercial. We like being able to buy a summer flower in February—in fact, we’ve built a holiday around it—but we also distrust fakery. The Victorian writer Charles Manby Smith voiced a complaint in 1853 that florists still hear today. The flowers he bought from a traveling florist in London drooped within a day or two of purchase, owing perhaps to “an overdose of stimulating fluid.” That’s the trouble with this business: the product is unpredictable, and the customers are fickle. Although the demand for flowers in London was on the increase, Smith warned that “the commerce in blossoming flowers is one of the most uncertain and dangerous speculations in which the small street-traders of London can engage.”
So are we being tricked when a scientist engineers a lily that doesn’t shed pollen, or when a grower forces tulips to bloom in December? Does it matter that a dewy-fresh bouquet of roses traveled halfway around the world and lived without water for several days before it arrived at the supermarket? If the mixed bouquet of red roses and pink chrysanthemums designed by a national wire service at Valentine’s Day is indistinguishable from thousands of others delivered that same day all across the country, does that make the message it carries any less significant?
Yes and no. There’s no doubt that flowers underwent a complete makeover in the twentieth century. New breeding techniques, advanced greenhouse technology, and global transportation systems saw to that. Thanks to those advances, there are some fantastic flowers on the market, all year long, for a remarkably cheap price. But modern flowers have lost something, too. They’re tamer, better behaved, less fickle and less seasonal. Many have lost their scent, and I wondered if they were also losing their identify, their power, or their passion. We want a flower to be perfect, but we also want it to be unique, extraordinary. We want it to be a revelation, a one-of-a-kind experience. Such a thing gets harder to find every year.
My morning at the San Francisco Flower Mart led to a morning at the Los Angeles Flower District, which led me around the world to find out where all these perfect flowers come from. I hung out in flower shops in Manhattan and boarded cargo planes in Miami. I watched millions of flowers race through the Dutch flower auction in a single morning. I sat in a florist’s back room on Valentine’s Day and listened to husbands and lovers call, desperate and lovesick.
Flowers today may be better traveled than the people who buy them. Let’s say you live in Las Vegas. Have you been to Bogotá, Miami, and San Francisco? Your flowers have. Or maybe you’re in Maine. Your flowers could have been to Kenya, Holland, and Manhattan before they showed up at your daughter’s wedding. They may have flown on bigger planes than you have. More people—field workers, supervisors, sales reps, brokers, truckers, auctioneers, wholesalers, buyers, bookkeepers, retailers—have talked about your flowers in more languages than you can probably say “hello” in.
And even that’s not the whole story. Flowers are created in laboratories, bred in test tubes, grown in factories, harvested by machines, packed into boxes, sold at auctions, and then flown across oceans and continents. The idea of all this floral commerce, rather than crushing my passion for flowers, only fueled it. Imagine sixty acres of greenhouses in one place. Nineteen million flowers on the auction floor and people buying, with a wave of the hand, more flowers than most of us will purchase in my lifetime. Forty billion dollars changing hands each year, all in the name of flowers. The idea was intoxicating.
Before long, it became clear to me that this global flower traffic was not without consequence. A hundred years ago, almost all of the cut flowers sold in the United States were also grown here; now roughly three-fourths of our flowers are imports, mostly coming from Latin America. The flowers themselves have been forced to change in response. They are now bred more for their suitability as freight than for any of their more refined qualities—delicacy, grace, and fragrance. They may have lost their scent, but they gained a longer vase life. They’ve lost their individuality, but gained the ability to travel all the way from Ecuador or Holland to sit on your hall table in the middle of December.
This global shift also affects people, like the growers in California who have left their family farms and gone into the import business, or the Main Street florist who sells more cheap cash-and-carry bouquets than carefully designed arrangements. And every year around Valentine’s Day, some newspaper runs what I’ve come to call the “blood and roses” story—the one that warns that behind every Latin American or African rose is an exploited worker and a poisoned river. There’s some truth to that story. In Ecuador I watched women dip long-stemmed roses, blossom-first, into a barrel of fungicide—a spectacle that put me off roses for months.
It might be that it’s unromantic to call a flower a commodity or a manufactured product, but flowers are all of these things at once. They are ephemeral, emotional, and impractical, but we Americans buy about four billion of them a year. We buy more flowers than we do Big Macs. Flowers are big business. It just happens to be a gorgeous, bewitching, bewildering business.
It would be impossible to tell the story of every flower in every market around the world, but here is a cast of characters who represent, in some way, this quest for perfection: John Mason and his blue rose. Leslie Woodriff and his ‘Star Gazer’ lily. Lane DeVries, owner of the largest cut flower farm in the United States. Roberto Nevado, a socially conscious rose grower in Ecuador. I’ve come to realize that they all want the same thing: to produce the ideal flower, the one you can’t do without.
I’m not a florist or a hybridizer or a grower. I’m a gardener and a passionate consumer of flowers. The more time I spent around the flower industry, the more I wondered if we were expecting too much from them. Who are we to take a symbol of perfection, purity, and love, and try to improve upon it, to spiff it up for the marketplace?
In the fourth act of Shakespeare’s King John, the Earl of Salisbury counsels the king against a second coronation, calling it “wasteful and ridiculous excess”
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily / To throw a perfume on the violetFor the last two hundred years, we have abbreviated these words and used the phrase “gild the lily” to describe unnecessary overembellishment. To spray glitter or perfume on a flower may seem excessive, but the industry does both of those things. They also artificially extend their lives, engineer brighter colors, and tinker with scent, all in an effort to give us what we want.
Where have our desires led us? Are we, in fact, gilding the lily?