Amy Stewart
Dirt &
GardenRant

Amy Stewart is the author of three books. Her most recent, Flower Confidential, was just published by Algonquin Books. It offers an inside look at the $40 billion/year cut-flower industry -- from breeders to growers to the florist on the corner. We spoke to Amy at the very beginning of her 40-day book tour...

This is your third book. And you've been a gardening columnist for a long time. And you recently received an NEA grant for creative writing. How did you come to writing as a career?

I've always wanted to be a writer. When I was five, if you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said "writer." (And ballerina. And veterinarian. Fortunately, those didn't stick.) I didn't really know how to go about becoming a writer, so after college I got a regular job and wrote in my spare time. That turns out to be a pretty good way to do it. I had to develop some pretty strong work habits to write a book at the end of an 8-5 day at the office. I work 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, and it just feels normal to me.

Tell us a little bit about the orgins of "Flower Confidential." How did you get started writing about the flower industry?

I live in Eureka, California, just down the street from the largest cut flower grower in the country, Sun Valley Floral Farm. I went to their open house one year and was just amazed to see that flowers come from factories. I had no idea that there was so much technology and equipment and science involved in growing something as simple as a flower. Then I figured out that in order for me to write this book, I'd have to travel to Ecuador, Holland, Miami, New York -- and that pretty much sealed the deal.

What was the most surprising thing you learned or witnessed in your research?

I didn't know that 78% of our flowers are imported, mostly from Latin America. I think most of us don't give any thought to where our flowers come from. But many flowers--especially roses, carnations, and chrysanthemums--are surprisingly durable. They can be grown on the equator, flown to the US, put on a truck and driven across country, all without ever being in water at all. As long as you can keep them cold, they're surprisingly tough.

What does Valentine's Day mean for the flower industry? How much of the annual floral sales are generated on February 14th?

Valentine's Day is huge. It's a lot of pressure. You're trying to grow all these summer flowers like roses and get them to bloom all at once just before the big day. A flower shop might bring in a third of its annual revenue on February 14. The flowers have to be perfect, and everybody has to get it right on this one day. It's not like Mother's Day, when you can send flowers anytime that week and your mother will be happy to get them.

You note that more and more bouquets are being purchased from supermarkets rather than flower shops. What other trends do you see affecting the way we view and consume flowers in the coming years?

American consumers are a little behind Eureopean consumers in a couple of ways. For one thing, we are pretty much buying flowers based on price. We don't have any other basis for making our decision. Europeans know how to check for quality and freshness, and they understand the difference between an upscale, luxury rose that has been handled with a great deal of care so that it will last a long time in the vase, compared to a more everyday bouquet that might be lower quality. Think about the difference between Two Buck Chuck and a fabulous Silver Oak Cabernet. Those differences exist in the floral world too, but most of us don't know about it.

Also, Europeans are used to being able to buy organic, eco-certified, or fair trade flowers. Until recently, there has been no such program in the United States. But now the VeriFlora program that I wrote about in the book is rolling out its retail campaign. This year you'll be able to buy VeriFlora-certified flowers at grocery stores and flower shops. Later this year, the Fair Trade program will introduce Fair Trade-certified flowers to the US.

Engineered flowers such as the "blue rose" are being developed. What's your personal take on Frankenflowers?

You know, I looked into what was going on with GMO flowers like the blue rose, which (if the scientists are successful) will involve implanting a petunia gene into a rose to create blue pigment. I understand the opposition to GMO products, but the fact is that these flowers are usually sterile and even if they weren't, it's not like a rose or a carnation in your living room vase is going to set seed and escape into the wild. To me, it's a novelty. I look at the crazy gerbera daisies that are being bred with two or three petal colors. Sure, they're not natural, but they're kind of cool, and I'm not convinced that there's any real harm being done.

John Mason, the scientist working on the blue rose, told me that the biggest criticism they get is that they could be spending their time searching for a cure for cancer instead. OK, fair enough. But if they're going to breed flowers, of course they're going to try to hit the jackpot by creating some extraordinary new flower that no one's ever seen.

On my blog I wrote about a new brown rose that's just rolling out this year. It turns out that brown is the hot new color for weddings, so I got tons of comments from brides looking for brown roses for their bouquets. But it takes a while for a new rose to find its way to market. So finally I put up another post that basically said, "Girlfriends, please calm down. You're the bride. The focus is you, not the flowers. Buy some beautiful cream-colored roses, tie a brown ribbon around them, and go walk down that aisle and live happily ever after." It's amazing how much brides get worked up about this stuff.

What led you to start blogging? And now you have more than one blog -- how quickly did you come to be a multi-blog blogger?

Ah, my long and storied blogging past. I started a blog about earthworms on Salon's Radio UserLand blog section for my last book, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms. I blogged the book tour and it was great fun. It was--at the time--the only earthworm blog out there, if you can believe that.

I migrated to Blogger and then started a second blog called Humboldt Hens when I got chickens. The idea was to just post all our adorable baby chick photos so friends who weren't really interested in daily poultry updates could go check it out whenever they wanted to. (I strongly advise new parents to try this strategy.) But once again, that blog got a little bit of a following as one of the only chicken blogs out there at the time.

Then (I told you this was a long story) I started a third blog called Dirt for gardening columns and general gardening stuff. Part of the reason for all these different blogs was that Blogger didn't support categories.

I was frustrated with the lack of good, opinionated, fiery, uppity garden writing out there. The only place I was finding it was on blogs. So I contacted a few other like-minded garden bloggers and together we started GardenRant. To complete my tour of blogging software, we tried WordPress and Movable Type before finally settling on TypePad.

I can say without hesitation that TypePad is the best blogging platform out there for someone like me who knows just enough HTML to be dangerous. It's incredibly easy to customize without any HTML at all, but if you've just got to have a little, you can do that, too.

So now I'm back down to two blogs: GardenRant, which is a group blog, and Dirt, which is also on TypePad. All of my old blogs are now happily merged into one, thanks to TypePad's import feature and categories.

How has having a blog affected your work? What do you think blogs mean for the publishing industry?

As a writer with a book to sell, it's a great way to post updates about the book tour, media and reviews, and to comment on stories in the news that relate to the subject of my book. As a writer with something to get off her chest, it's a great place to do the kind of writing I can't do anywhere else. I can rant and stamp my feet and get political and swoon and fall in love. I can post crazy pictues. I can veer dangerously off-topic. It's very freeing.

But there is no substitute for the printed page. I'm a book, newspaper, and magazine junkie. You can't read a blog in the bathtub. You can't snuggle up with it in bed. I love the smell and feel of books, and I always will.

What blogs do you read regularly?

Gawker, Gothamist, and Bookslut, for sure. Powell's book blog, where I'm actually going to be a guest blogger for the week of Feb. 12. Too many garden bloggers to mention, but they're all GardenRant regulars so you can find them in the "Friends of Rant" section of the sidebar. My partners in crime on that blog are Michele Owens at Sign of the Shovel, Susan Harris at Takoma Gardener, and Elizabeth Licata at Gardening While Intoxicated. Oh, and of course, I read my husband's blog, Fine Books Blog. He's the co-owner and editor of a magazine called Fine Books & Collections.

What's next after your book tour? Do you have your next book in the works?

Not yet! I'm on a two-month book tour. It's a sprint. I hardly have time to think right now, much less get going on a new book! Once things settle down this summer, I'll go outside and see what inspires me.

And of course, I'm blogging the book tour on my shiny new Moto Q, thanks to TypePad Mobile.