forget the alphas, bring on the tulips!

In an effort to understand how flowers are grown for the commercial flower industry, I came across a few paragraphs in Amy Stewart's Flower Confidential. They read almost like something out of Brave New World, but instead of Alphas and Deltas, we have tulips and lilies. I'm including a few paragraphs here to give one a better idea into what large-scale commercial greenhouse-growing is like:

For the most part, they don't even have to bother putting roots down into the earth. Tulips and lilies are tucked into their plastic crates, and gerberas live quite contentedly in plastic pots that contain no dirt at all, just shredded coconut fiber that acts as a clean, disease-free conduit for water and fertilizer. [...] The lighting is perfect, and if it's not, a battery of equipment and a trained staff are there to take care of it [...].

Water and food move through tiny plastic drip lines that resemble IV tubing, and if something about the meal is not quite right, it is not incumbent upon the flower to complain. The staff measure the fertizilizer left in the water that runs out the other end of the drip system; if there is too much of a particular nutrient left the plants might have been overfed and unable to take up any more, and if there is too little they might have grabbed all they could and still felt hungry at the end of their meal. Either way, it's all adjusted right away, before the plant shows the first sign of stress. They're even groomed to perfection. Smaller buds are carefully snipped off to encourage larger blossoms, and any leaf that is blocking light to the rest of the plant or showing signs of fatigue is quickly removed. A leaf's duty is to support the flower, not sap its strength. If it isn't doing an efficient enough job of capturing light to transform it into energy for the plant, it's got to go.

There are some drawbacks to this sheltered lifestyle. Greenhouse flowers might miss the company of bees, for instance. They don't get pollinated, because they aren't expected to reproduce and they've been bred to produce huge flowers without it. Even if a bee did sneak in and make a move, it would probably be pointless--breeders often make flowers sterile as a little extra protection for the patent. Greenhouse flowers won't feel the rain showering down on their leaves as overhead watering encourages disease and droplets of water on a leaf can intensify the sun's rays, leading to a scorch. Even the wind won't shake their stems unless, of course, a good stiff breeze is needed to cool of the greenhouse, to keep gases like ethylene from stagnating, or simply to toughen up the flowers and make their stems stronger so they'll stand up straighter in the vase. In that case, the fans come on and blow an artificial wind along the rows of flowers.

As comfortable as their time in the greenhouse might be, it also goes by dizzyingly fast. A tulip can shoot up and bloom in three weeks. An Asiatic lily might take only nine weeks. Gerberas are expected to produce one or two perfect blooms every month. And when their time is up, each flower is picked individually by the same person who has cared for the plant, day in and day out, for weeks or months (Stewart 93-94).

Stewart, Amy. Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007.

Who said anything about violets, Violet?

Violets are funny little things. Presently, they cannot readily be found in many flower shops, unless of course one shops near where they are grown, which is pretty much only in the Pacific states. A century ago, however, violets were one of the most popular cut flowers, ranking just behind roses, carnations, and chrysanthemums. Viola odorata is a short-lived flower, lasting at most four days from when it is picked, but it's sweet scent enhanced it's popularity during the Victorian era (Stewart 62). Currently there are over 500 species including unscented violas and pansies, which can be found in many gardens across the country.

In the early 1890s, Rhinebeck, New York was the violet capital of the world. Violets were easy to grow in the winter, but somewhat tricky to harvest in the spring. Workers would often have to lay atop wooden planks so not to damage the violet's delicate blooms. At a time when a florist was defined as a person who both grew and sold flowers, violets were easy to come by if one lived near a farm outside the city where they were grown. From the 1890s until WWI, Rhinebeck produced 35 million bloosoms a year, while a bunch sold for less than a dollar. With such a powerful and enjoyable scent, violets came to be used for perfumes and even breath fresheners for Victorian women (Stewart 63).

Around the same time that Rhinebeck was becoming the world's violet capital, Dominik Garibaldi was coming into his own in California. Travelling to California in in the early 1900s, Garibaldi settled in the San Mateo valley just south of San Francisco (Robinson). With it's well-drained sandy soil, cool ocean breezes, and seasonal winter rains from the Pacific, the area was perfect for violet-growing. The Garibaldi violet farm is one of the last violet farms in the country and probably the most well-known. They produce about 15,000 bunches per year with 25-35 blossoms per bunch (Stewart 70).

Violet fun facts:

• Napoleon Bonaparte's wife, Josephine, loved violets and wore them on their wedding day. Napoleon adopted them as part of his campaign when he was banished from the country, encouraging his followers to wear them while proclaiming that he would "return with the violets in the spring" (Albert).
• Violets have been used for centuries as an herbal remedy for sore throats, as a sleep aid, and against inflammations. Later, it was discovered that violets contained a soothing mucilage that was laced with a salicylic acid, a precurser of asprin (Albert).
• "Unlike most other florists' flowers, they [violets] have not been improved upon, genetically modified, or coaxed into growing taller or living longer. There as been no perfume thrown on [...] violets" (Stewart 66).