Passage I

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the book Flower Confidential by Amy Stewart(©2007 by Amy Stewart)

"Holland" and "the Netherlands" refer to the same country.

I woke up at 5 a.m and started at the ceiling of my Amsterdam hotel room.Outside, the canal boats, which were rented to rowdy college students, had just gone quiet. This was a city of late risers. I got dressed and walked gingerly through the lobby, not wanting to wake the innkeeper who slept on the ground floor, and stepped into the dark, empty streets. The fact is that you want to go see someone in the flower trade. His is the hour at which you must rise. Even then, when you finally show up at 6 or 7 a.m. blinking in the sudden daylight and trying to remember why you scheduled the meeting In the first place, the person you’ve gone to meet will look impatient, as though half the day is wasted already.

I was on my way to Aalsmeer to see the famous Dutch flower auction. It's known around the world as a remarkably high-tech, high-speed way to sell flowers, but it had modest beginnings: In a cafe outside of Amsterdam in 1911 some growers came up with the idea of holding an auction to give them more control over how their flowers were priced and sold. They called their auction Bloemenlust. It was not long before a competing auction sprang up nearby—the history of flower markets everywhere is that as soon as there is one, there are two—and each day as the auctions ended, flowers were piled onto bicycles and boats to be delivered along Holland's narrow canals and even narrower streets. This arrangement continued until 1968, the two auctions thriving nearly side by side, until they finally merged and became what is known today as Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer, the largest of a hall of major flower auctions going on year-round in the Netherlands.

The bus to Aalsmeer took me through the shuttered streets of Amsterdam and headed south, past the airport. The world seemed to be coming to life at last and on the road we passed dozens of trucks—some of them plastered with the same grower and wholesaler logos you 'd see in Miami-carrying flowers to and from the auction. This next phase of a flower’s life, after it leaves the grower and before it settles into a vase on someone's hall table, is remarkable for both its duration and its complexity. A flower can spend a week making its way through a maze of warehouses, airports, auctions, and wholesale markets, and it will emerge from this exhausting journey looking almost as fresh as the day it was picked.

The existence of this auction highlights one major difference between flowers destined for the European market and those sold in the United States. The flowers that I saw arriving in Miami were headed in every direction at once: they were going by truck, rail, and plane to wholesale markets, distribution centers, bouquet makers, retailers, and even directly to customers here is not a single, centralized market for flowers in the United States. But the flowers that come into Schiphol Airport outside of Amsterdam. The major port of entry for European flowers, are almost all going to Aalsmeer. This is the very center of the flower trade, handling most of the flowers sold on the European market and some of the goods going to Russia, China, Japan, and even the United States. The flowers going up for auction come from Kenya, Zimbabwe, Israel, Colombia, Ecuador, and European countries, making this a sort of global stopping-off point for most of the industry. Every flower market around the world watches the Dutch auction, which acts as a sort of engine for the trade, setting prices and standards worldwide. If you want to follow a flower to market, you ‘ll end up here eventually.

By the time the bus pulled into the large circular driveway at the public entrance to the auction, the day really was half over. Flowers and plants had been arriving since midnight, and bidding started before dawn. I stepped off the bus into a kind of floral rush hour: trucks roaring past, people racing from one end of the complex to another, the morning sun glaring down. This lace is a behemoth in the small town of Aalsmeer. It employs ten thousand people a town of just twenty thousand and occupies almost 450 acres, an area larger than Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom and Epcot theme parks combined. In fact, the auction is like a city in itself, one that runs twenty-tour hours a day. All the major growers and wholesalers keep an office ,and maybe a warehouse and a loading dock, at Aalsmeer. A full 20 percent of the cut flowers in the world are sold at this very spot, and about hall of the world’s cut-flower supply moves through the Dutch auction system.