Flower Confidential

The flower business is a $40 billion global industry devoted to making flowers flawless. Stewart explores the relevance of flowers, and in the process she reveals all that has been gained--and lost--by tinkering with nature. We buy more flowers a year than we do Big Macs, spending $6.2 billion annually.

We use them to mark our most important events, to express sentiments that might otherwise go unsaid. And we demand perfection. So it s no surprise that there is a $40 billion global industry devoted to making flowers flawless. Amy Stewart takes us inside the flower trade from the hybridizers, who create new varieties in the laboratory, to the growers, who produce flowers by the millions (often in a factory-like setting), to the Dutch auctioneers, who set the bar (and the price), and ultimately to the neighborhood florists orchestrating the mind-boggling demands of Valentine s and Mother s Day.

There s the breeder intent on developing the first blue rose; an eccentric horticultural legend who created the world s most popular lily; a grower of gerberas of every color imaginable; and the equivalent of a Tiffany diamond: the Forever Young rose. Stewart explores the relevance of flowers in our lives and in our history, and in the process she reveals all that has been gained and lost by tinkering with nature.

Review: Stewart, an avid gardener and winner of the 2005 California Horticultural Society's Writer's Award for her book The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms, now tackles the global flower industry. Her investigations take her from an eccentric lily breeder to an Australian business with the alchemical mission of creating a blue rose.

She visits a romantically anachronistic violet grower, the largest remaining California grower of cut flowers and a Dutch breeder employing high-tech methods to develop flowers in equatorial countries where wages are low. Stewart follows a rose from the remote Ecuadoran greenhouse where it's grown to the American retailer where it's finally sold, and visits a huge, stock -exchange-like Dutch flower auction.

These present-day adventures are interspersed with fascinating histories of the various aspects of flower culture, propagation and commerce. Stewart's floral romanticism-she admits early on that she's always had a generalized, smutty sort of lust for flowers -survives the potentially disillusioning revelations of the flower biz, though her passion only falters a few times, as when she witnesses roses being dipped in fungicide in preparation for export.

By the end, this book is as lush as the flowers it describes.