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.