People really like flowers: A Timeline.

January 31, 2024 Hannah Edmunds

THE PAST: SYMBOL

Cave paintings from 43,000 to 65,000 years ago show eyes, faces, horses, bison, lions, bears, boars, paw prints, handprints, human silhouettes, spirals, and snakes. There do not appear to be flowers or even flower-like symbols. But pollen found at a Neanderthal gravesite in Iraq suggests, at the time of the burial, the ground had been covered with flowers. While scientists disagree on a reason for the presence of the pollen, everyone agrees there were countless flowering plants 50,000 years ago.

The representation of memory with pictures is the basis of written language. Symbols became communication, record keeping and math. Which lead to engineering of buildings and ships, livestock farming, irrigation, and the cultivation of plants. From earliest days, humans selected plant qualities in propagation for higher yield, better flavor, or nutritional value, and certainly for ornament.

Specialized products and skills gave rise to trade, which resulted in accumulated wealth. Abundance opened a place for pleasure gardens and other artistic expressions in architecture, clothing, jewelry, sculpture, and painting. Forward to 5000 years ago, sunflowers, cornflowers, poppies, and blue lotuses are everywhere in ancient Egyptian art and design.

Speed ahead again to 1638, a Dutch man might be sitting at the head of a wooden table. In the candlelight he notices the hollows under his wife’s cheekbones. His children in their rumpled clothes are quiet and listless. The three year old has fallen asleep. He looks down at his empty hands and thinks about their barn and all the livestock he sold to buy shares in tulip futures. Now he has nothing. The Tulip Mania of the mid 1630s, a cautionary tale about speculative markets, also permanently linked flowers to commerce.

THE PRESENT: COMMODITY

The modern flower market is complex and vast. In 2023, people in the US spent $1.8 billion on cut flowers and annual flowering plants. The global flower industry is worth $55 billion. It includes child labor, unfair wages, worker exposure to herbicide, pesticides and fertilizer, high energy use for air travel and refrigeration, and large-scale use of natural resources.

Most likely, any cut flower for sale at a bodega, grocery store or florist in the United States has come from far away. The Netherlands produces peonies, tulips, chrysanthemums and lilies. Columbia is one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of roses, carnations, and chrysanthemums. Ecuador exports specialty roses. Kenya, Africa’s largest flower producer, exports roses. Ethiopia also produces roses. In the United States, California produces lilies, roses, and Gerber daisies. China produces roses, gladiolas, Gerber daisies, calla lilies, baby’s breath, anthurium, lilies and sea lavender. India produces marigolds, roses, and jasmine. Italy is known for high quality ranunculus and anemones. Israel produces baby’s breath. Typically, flowers are grown in one country, auctioned in another, sold to regional distributers, then to retail vendors and finally purchased by me or you.

Annuals, found at garden centers and grocery stores, are small, blooming, or about to bloom herbaceous plants in small, plastic containers (usually 4 - 5” diameter, or an egg carton-like pack) filled with potting mix. Annuals are manufactured by a sprawling network of breeders, growers, distributors, wholesalers, and retailers and with the use of non-renewable, natural resources. Commercial annual plants are usually produced in greenhouses. If only a third of the U.S. market for flowers, which is a conservative guess, people in the U.S. spend $600 million per year on annuals. If, on average, the retail cost per container is about $10, 60 million plastic containers are needed to meet this demand. Startlingly, if each annual needs one cup of potting mix, not including what might be used in the seedling stage, the total requirement per year is about 5 million cubic feet or rounding down, approximately 185,000 cubic yards. This is the equivalent of 290 square miles, 3’ deep of the primary ingredient, peat moss. (More to come on the potting mix industry in another blog post. Almost 400 square miles of peat bog are lost every year for the commercial growing and the retail bagged soil industry.)

The size of the market suggests that people really like flowers. Flowers represent Monet’s garden with its wide swaths of blue and lavender irises swaying near a pond with a green bridge. They are the secretly sensuous, pastel shapes made by the flower ambassador, Georgia O’Keeffe.

Flowers are also the reproductive structures of 90 percent of the world’s plants. Three fourths of these plants and 35 percent of the world’s food crops depend on the symbiotic relationship between wildflowers and pollinators. Bees, butterflies and moths, birds and bats, and beetles and other insects depend on pollen or nectar from specific flowers. Many plants cannot reproduce without pollen carried to them by foraging pollinators. Pollinators cannot provide this service without specific, non-contaminated flowers they were evolved to live on. Without these flowers within flight range the pollinators will not survive. The problem is extremely urgent.

THE FUTURE: FLOWER CHILDREN

In King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998), Adam Hochschild recounts the exploitation of the Congo Free State by King Leopold II of Belgium between 1885 and 1908. By 1860, other European states had claimed most coastal regions of Africa. King Leopold, desperate to become a colonial ruler, used slave labor to strip the Congo River region of ivory and rubber. Local people were forced to work through terror, starvation, maiming, family separation, and imprisonment. Missionaries and human rights advocates publicized the atrocities but not before entire cultures were destroyed and wilderness was permanently altered.

Throughout the world, colonial powers set in place large-scale economies of extraction, mass production and global trade. Eventually, hundreds of years in, exploitation of people and land lead to massive social and political upheaval. Particularly between 1950 and 1970, the world saw major changes. Countries in Africa and South America won independence. Cold War rivalry between the USSR and the US played out in Vietnam and other countries. The United States protected its economic and political interests with overt and secret interference in regime change. In China, Mao’s Great Leap Forward Campaign to collectivize agriculture and industry lead to widespread famine and major changes in land use.

Violent conflict, military dictatorship, famine and the cold war shaped ideas about politics, race, and culture. The peace movement of the 1960s emerged in response to events and to the writers, political thinkers and artists from South America, Africa, India, and elsewhere. Widespread anti-war sentiment and civil disobedience became associated with flowers.

By the 1970s, “flower children” had revolutionized art, literature, cuisine, clothing, music, hair styles, and design. In North America and Europe, they tried going back to the land. This meant eschewing formal architecture and garden design for hand crafted buildings and loose gardens of wildflowers, herbs, and food. Helen and Scott Nearing were pioneers of the philosophy. Living the Good Life; How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World (originally published in 1954, republished in 1970) offered a blueprint for people who hoped to thrive without inadvertently supporting unjust political power or causing environmental harm.

Current day thinking on how to live sanely in a troubled world often focuses on consumer choice. A young man approached me outside a client’s house where I was working in the front garden to ask if I wanted to buy a bouquet-of-the-month subscription. The flowers would be grown on “sustainable” farms throughout the world, and he would plant a tree to offset the carbon footprint. (More on tree planting efforts in a future blogpost.) The offer sounds promising but avoids reality. Big horticulture uses plantation-style production methods which are damaging to people and pollinators.

Looking ahead, massive changes caused by weather, food shortages, water shortages, and war will inevitably re-localize economies. Wildflowers will become the new normal for gardens. More planting will be done by seed, ornamental and food crops will be grown together, and more urban land will become open ground to absorb water and create habitat. Language will become specific. People will know flower names, when and where they grow, which pollinators need them and how they are also beneficial to people. Flower children will thrive in every classroom because every school will have access to wild, outdoor space.

In 2019, the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society collaborated with the National Wildlife Federation to plant wildlife gardens in vacant lots in Philadelphia.

“Each pollinator garden consists of approximately 300 native plants that support a healthy ecosystem,” says [Samir] Dalal. “Plants -- ranging from flowering echinacea, aster, and bee balm to local grasses such as prairie dropseed and blue grama -- provide food, shelter, and places for local bees, birds, and insects to raise their young.”

Efforts like this are often inexpensive to implement, easy to tend and they endure. There are similar plantings in Brooklyn, Detroit, and other cities throughout the world.