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Jack Covert Selects: Flower Confidential

Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers by Amy Stewart, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 280 Pages, $23.95 Hardcover, February 2007, 9781565124387

I have always liked flowers. I spend a lot of time in my gardens on my infrequent days off and my parents ran a small-town greenhouse/florist operation for a short time. Though this book doesn’t qualify as a business book in the classic sense, it qualifies as a book about an industry, an industry that is changing rapidly, an industry that is quite unique.

As the author says:
“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 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 within a week. That’s all you get for your money. In spite of this, the cut flower market is a forty-billion dollar business worldwide.�

When this book first crossed my desk, I was concerned that the book would be an “expose� of the evils of the international flower trade. Instead, this is a straight-forward account of a very large business, and yet she tells the story with a wide-eyed innocence and humor that is fun to read.

“It might be that it’s unromantic to call a flower a commodity or a manufactured product, but flowers are all those things at once. They are ephemeral, emotional, and impractical, but we Americans buy about four billion of them. We buy more flowers than we do Big Macs. Flowers are big business. It just happens to be a gorgeous, bewitching, bewildering business.�

Like the industry itself, this book is fresh, different, and while it may be a little self-indulgent to include it in a set of business book reviews, I truly believe that you will enjoy this book. And if that doesn’t sell you on the book, the author also includes an appendix where she lists the best way to care for cut flowers. Here is just a tidbit of what you can learn:

“Commercial flower food really will extend the vase life of flowers. You can buy it at craft stores, nurseries, and flower shops, but if you don’t have any use a pinch of sugar and a drop of bleach. (If you have it, you can also use a pinch of ground up Viagra, and expensive but effective treatment that prolongs vase life by helping to open vessels that conduct water up the stem to the flowers in much the same way that—well, never mind.�