Flower Confidential The Good The Bad and

Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in
the Business of Flowers (review)
Deborah Jean Warner
Technology and Culture, Volume 49, Number 1, January 2008, pp. 293-294
(Review)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2008.0019
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/230938
[ Access provided at 24 Oct 2020 20:10 GMT from University of Melbourne-Library (+1 other institution account) ]
B O O K R E V I E W S
Watching the Traffic Go By has several shortcomings, however. First, its

segmentation of society into white elites, women, and people of color is
overly simplistic. Second, it fails to recognize that the tremendous political
power of interests promoting the auto-freeway system derives from the
auto’s mass appeal, as pointed out by political scientist James Dunn. Research
by John Pucher and others unequivocally shows that people across the world,
regardless of cultural backgrounds and infrastructure policies of their gov-
ernments, are embracing mass mobility as soon as they can afford it.
Third, it fails to consider literature celebrating the auto as a liberator
rather than isolator. The Lynds, for example, in their sociological study of
Muncie, Indiana, during the 1920s concluded that the auto more than any
other factor transformed the social mores of much of the community by
liberating women from traditional bonds and providing a degree of unsu-
pervised social interaction previously unknown. More recently, the plan-
ner/futurist Mel Webber proclaimed the rise of community without
propinquity, in which automobility together with mass communications
allow users to pick and choose their friends and colleagues based on areas
of interest rather than on geographic proximity, resulting in richer rather
than more impoverished relationships. While there is a lot to debate about
this idea, Fotsch does not even raise the argument. But despite the criti-
cisms noted, and despite Fotsch’s irritating lapses into the prose of critical
theory, I recommend Watching the Traffic Go By for a provocative read.
GREGORY L. THOMPSON
Dr. Thompson is a professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida State
University, where he teaches courses in transportation planning. He is the author of The Pas-
senger Train in the Motor Age (1993) and articles in transportation policy analysis and history.
Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in

the Business of Flowers.
By Amy Stewart. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2007.
Pp. 306. $23.95.
Leslie Woodruff, the first character we meet in Amy Stewart’s delightful

book, was a crusty Californian who hybridized flowers the old-fashioned
way. By brushing the pollen of one flower onto the stamen of another and
waiting to see what emerged from the ground, he managed to combine the
upright stance of Asiatic lilies with the bold color and fragrance of Oriental
lilies. His Star Gazer lily was patented in 1976 and, because it went well in
floral arrangements and had a long vase life and good shipping character-
istics, it became the best-selling lily of all time. Some thirty-six million
stems are sold every year through the Dutch auctions alone.
After a short account of open-air growing, Stewart describes large
greenhouses where each blossom is looked on as a unit of profit. Because
293
T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U LT U R E
flower purchases are incredibly seasonal—Valentine’s Day and Mother’s

Day being the biggest floral events of the year—growers keep tight control
of their plants by such means as constricting the buds and varying the
length of the daily darkness. At Sun Valley in California, the largest flower
farm in the United States, most of the workers are Latinos, and at Terra
Nigra in the Netherlands, most of the workers are Poles. Chemicals are an
JANUARY
important part of the process but, because they are expensive and because
2008 of environmental concerns, the large growers strive to minimize their use.
VOL. 49
In Equador, however, the pressure to produce perfect flowers has led to a
host of perhaps unanticipated problems: workers now earn a steady salary
but no longer have time to grow their own foodstuffs, and the use of chem-
icals puts strains on the environment. The emergence of flower farms in
Colombia and Equador, incidentally, was a direct consequence of the
American government’s offer of tax advantages for farmers who grew
things other than coca.
In the third section, Stewart takes us to the Miami Airport, through
which pass 88 percent of the cut flowers that come into the United States
and where they are inspected, for bugs and contraband, by representatives
of the Department of Homeland Security. We then visit the great Dutch
flower market at Aaslmeer with its descending auction—the price drops
until someone is ready to bid—and several local florist shops in the United
States. Along the way, Stewart explains that many flowers are dipped into a
fungicide just before shipment, and so one might think twice before
smelling floral bouquets. On the other hand, because scent uses energy that
might otherwise go into looks, most commercial flowers are scentless.
This book is not a history of technology, but it does make a convincing
argument that the flower industry is enormous and international, and that
the process of developing and growing flowers, and delivering them to our
local florists and grocery stores, involves a great deal of sophisticated sci-
ence and technology. It should, therefore, encourage historians of technol-
ogy to pay more attention to this and other parts of the natural world.
According to JSTOR, Technology and Culture has published nothing on cut
flowers and next to nothing on flowers of any sort.
DEBORAH JEAN WARNER
Deborah Warner, whose day job is curator of physical sciences at the National Museum of
American History, spends many happy hours watering and weeding her gardens.
294

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Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in

the Business of Flowers (review)

Deborah Jean Warner

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

Watching the Traffic Go By has several shortcomings, however. First, its

Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in

Leslie Woodruff, the first character we meet in Amy Stewart’s delightful

flower purchases are incredibly seasonal—Valentine’s Day and Mother’s

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