The Beauty of ‘Slow Flowers’ versus the Pretty Poison of Plants Grown with Dangerous Chemicals

New “slow flower” farms grow beautiful blooms—without health-harming chemicals used by overseas operations that dominate the U.S. flower market

By Maryn McKenna edited by Josh Fischman

Dahlias bloom at the Maine Flower Collective, a group of local growers.

On a low hill near the coast of Maine, the fresh petals of double daffodils shake frills of gold and peach in a gusting breeze. It is the middle of May, a clear blue ­sky overhead, and the lacy burgundy foliage of peonies and new stalks of twiggy curly willow are poking through swaths of black landscape fabric. Against the walls of a greenhouse, seedlings of cosmos and celosia, lisianthus and snapdragons rise in plastic trays. Mud season is barely over, but the turf is vivid green.

Those fragrant, frilly blooms will make up wedding arches and table settings and bouquets, the mainstays of the profitable farm and floral studio that farmer Bo Dennis, 35, has built since he bought this parcel several years ago. “When people come to us, we say, this is what we’re good at: local flowers that are sustainably grown,” he says, tucking a curl of light hair back under his beanie with muddy hands. “Sometimes I do get clients that say, ‘We want all hydrangeas and all roses, and we want them in May’”—a date when those popular flowers won’t yet have bloomed in Maine. “I will say, ‘Great! Have a good celebration. I don’t think we’re the vendor for you.’”

What Dennis grows won’t be found among the blooms that cram the entrances of supermarkets, big-­box stores, downtown florists—most of the places where people buy flowers in the U.S. The bouquets that fill those spaces overwhelmingly come from equatorial countries, such as Ecuador and Ethiopia, where cheap labor and minimal environmental regulation make growing affordable. Those flowers are part of an enormously successful international market that sells blooms thousands of miles from their fields of origin and earns more than $25 billion every year.

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But pesticides and other agrochemicals required to sustain that scale of production can injure workers and their families. One ongoing study of children in Ecuador whose parents work at flower farms has documented deficits in attention and eye-­hand coordination, particularly after periods when these chemicals are heavily sprayed. Children born to women who work in floriculture regions have higher-­than-­normal rates of birth defects, another study found. And the risks extend to people around the world. In Belgium, florists with imported flowers had unhealthy levels of pesticide chemicals on their gloves, levels high enough to burn the skin if it wasn’t protected. And in the Netherlands, prolific use of antifungals on the country’s signature tulips has fostered the emergence of deadly drug-­resistant fungi.

The remedy for at least some of these problems is rising in small U.S. operations such as Dennis’s Dandy Ram Farm and others in North Carolina and Utah and throughout the country. Dennis came to floriculture out of a desire for economic self-sufficiency and career-long concern for the environment. He and other growers are building a new, surprisingly lucrative agricultural model—a “slow flower movement,” akin to the Slow Food movement, that offers a cleaner, greener alternative to modern floral production. They aim to protect ecosystems and build new economic pathways while bringing a bit of beauty—ungroomed, imperfect, unpredictable—back into the world.

Flowers are so present in our lives that we almost do not see them: sheathed in paper in every market, plunked in a vase on a table in any cafe. But while they are quotidian, they are also monumental; in many cultures, they memorialize the most important days of our lives, from graduations and promotions to weddings and funerals. They are vital to Catholic rituals, Hindu festivals, Buddhist temple offerings and Mexico’s Day of the Dead—and also, via chrysanthemums, to the quasi-­religion of U.S. college football homecoming games. (Mums are funeral flowers in parts of Europe and Asia, which might be a comfort to the losing team.) We invest them with so much meaning that we demand they always be perfect—although like any crop, they are fungible and fragile, subject to weather, diseases and decay.

And like any product, they are subject to the lure of cheaper production offshore. The movement of American manufacturing to countries with fewer regulations over land and labor is an old story, reenacted in products from furniture to cars to food. But the relocation of flower growing was not an accident of global economics. It was deliberately fostered by the U.S. government, part of the 20th-­century war on drugs.

A bag at Maine’s Dandy Ram Farm protects a delicate dahlia from pests, avoiding the use of chemicals.

In the 1990s, when cocaine flowing from South America was the main focus of drug interdiction, President George H. W. Bush proposed measures to boost legal businesses in the drug’s most important production areas. A 1991 law lifted or reduced tariffs on thousands of products produced in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Cut flowers were on the list, and it gave them an enormous boost. U.S. flower production shrank, and the market for imported flowers skyrocketed.

Take roses, the U.S. national flower. In 2002, according to Department of Agriculture data, 157.2 million homegrown roses were sold in the U.S. By 2019 that shrank to 17.2 million. Revenue from homegrown roses plunged as well, from $58.9 million in 2002 to $13.3 million in 2019. “About 25 years ago approximately 85 percent of what was sold in the U.S. was grown here; today it’s about 22 percent,” says Camron King, CEO of the trade group Certified American Grown. That decline represents an economic burden­—and, given the resonance of flowers, an emotional one, too. King feels that weight when he watches patriotically colored wreaths of red, white, and blue carnations being laid at sacred military sites such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. “There aren’t commercial-level carnation producers here in the United States any longer,” he points out. “Those are imported flowers honoring our American fallen heroes.”

Multiple global trends have benefited offshore flower growers: larger planes, easier refrigeration, low-­cost labor and land. But so has freedom from the rules that protect U.S. workers and consumers. “In California, but also in many other states, there are very strict regulations in terms of pesticides,” says Gerardo Spinelli, a production adviser at the University of California Cooperative Extension San Diego County. “Being in compliance is expensive.” But overseas, “these regulations are not there or are a lot less strict.”

The explosion of construction was the first bloom of the floriculture encouraged by that 1991 law, which would make Ecuador the third-­largest exporter of flowers in the world, a billion-­dollar trade that fields a workforce of more than 100,000 people. Ecuador specializes in roses; the cool mountain climate and consistent sunlight of its equatorial days are uniquely suited to producing straight-­stemmed, big-­blossomed flowers, highly sought after for celebratory bouquets. But those perfect plants don’t grow that way without assistance; they are sprayed routinely with fungicides and insecticides, especially organophosphates, which kill insects by interfering with their nervous systems. As Suárez earned his medical degree in Quito and then his Ph.D. back in the U.S., he became curious about how those compounds might affect the people living nearby.

Kate Del Vecchio collects deliveries at the Maine Flower Collective.

In 2008 he founded the Study of Secondary Exposures to Pesticides among Children and Adolescents, known as ESPINA for its acronym in Spanish, to explore whether children in Pedro Moncayo were affected by living in the center of greenhouse production and having parents and family members employed there. “We found what we call take-­home pesticide pathways, in which the workers are exposed, and then those pesticides adhere to their clothing or their hair and skin, or maybe they bring home tools, or they bring some pesticides to use in their own backyards,” Suárez says. “We’ve also looked at the proximity of homes to different spray sites. We tend to think of greenhouses as totally closed, but the fact is that they’re not: They have windows because you need some circulation of air, so the pesticide is not contained just within the crop.”

During reassessments, the investigators recruited additional participants to the cohort, topping out at 554 children and teens and collecting fresh samples of blood and urine from both new participants and long-­standing ones. They repeatedly found evidence of exposures to pesticides, demonstrating an ongoing problem. “There haven’t been any changes in regulations when it comes to pesticide use,” Suárez says. National political interest in the issue has waxed and waned, he adds, but local governments have consistently supported their agricultural workers as well as his research.

In 2017 a research team at the Autonomous University of Mexico State showed that birth defects in children born in a floriculture region, to women who worked in or near flower farms, occurred in 20 percent of births. That contrasted with 6 percent among women in the same state who worked outside of the flower industry. That same year a separate team of researchers showed that greenhouse workers in two Mexican states who mixed and applied pesticides had higher levels of pesticide biomarkers in their urine than did workers who had less contact with the chemicals. Then last year another paper reported that men who work in the Mexican flower industry and were often exposed to pesticides and fungicides have high blood levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines—small messenger proteins that normally alert the immune system to fight infection but can trigger chronic diseases when they are too abundant.

The colorful flowers are grown in season on local farms.

The perils posed by extensive pesticide use on flower farms outside the U.S. do not stay confined to those properties and their workers. In 2016 researchers in Belgium, who were alarmed by reports of flower workers’ illnesses, published a study on the hazards of flowers after they were cut and shipped. The blooms were not subject to strict rules imposed on food, because they are not a crop intended for eating. In two studies, the scientists tested flower bouquets sold at florists and in supermarkets and found levels of fungicides and pesticides—especially on roses—that could be harmful to the human nervous system if they were absorbed through the skin.

To ascertain whether any real risk existed, in follow-up research the scientists asked a group of florists to wear cotton gloves for several hours on two con­secutive days while trimming flowers and assembling bouquets and then analyzed what the gloves had picked up. They found 111 different agricultural
chemicals, mostly pesticides and fungicides, present in concentrations up to 1,000 times higher than are allowed on produce. Several were present in such high concentrations that they represented both immediate and chronic risks to the florists’ health, capable of causing skin burns and eye irritation, risking damage to a fetus or exposing a breast­fed child. The researchers noted that wearing gloves while working and not eating or smoking with flowers nearby would reduce the danger.

In the most troubling example, chemical use on flower farms has reached far beyond the farm environment, and farm workers and flower handlers, to affect people not involved with agriculture at all. In the early 2000s a group of physicians in the Netherlands began to notice a worrisome pattern in the sickest patients in their intensive care units. People whose immune systems have been undermined by illness and repeated rounds of drugs are vulnerable to what are called opportunistic infections, triggered by organisms that don’t cause disease in healthy people.

One of the most feared is a fungus called Aspergillus fumigatus, which lives in compost heaps and decaying vegetation and puffs out spores that drift through the air. A healthy immune system will sweep inhaled spores from the lung and dispose of them, but in someone with diminished defenses, they lodge in the lung lining and reproduce. The overwhelming infection that results, invasive aspergillosis, occurs in more than two million cases worldwide every year. It was almost always a death sentence until a class of antifungal drugs called azoles debuted in the 1990s and began saving patients from it.

A new greenhouse at Dandy Ram Farm holds snapdragons, zinnias, and many other flowers grown using organic farming principles.

But within 10 years of the drug class debuting, that trend reversed. ICU patients began dying again from invasive aspergillosis; when experts investigated, they discovered the fungus had developed resistance to azoles and was no longer vulnerable to the drugs’ attack. In critical care medicine, it is not unusual for infections to become resistant after rounds of drugs. But these azole-­resistant infections were occurring in people who had never received those antifungals—and their organisms displayed an identical genetic pattern even in patients hospitalized many miles from one another.

By processes that no one has fully defined—simultaneous evolution, or international sales of plants and bulbs, or fungal spores carried on the wind—lethal azole-­resistant Aspergillus spread worldwide. It is a persistent danger, says Paul Verweij, chief of medical microbiology at Radboud University Medical Center in the southern Netherlands, one of the first researchers to identify the problem. “The rate of occurrence is quite stable; it is not going down.”

To this point, there has been no indication that international flowers pose a danger to everyday consumers buying a bouquet at a supermarket. Patients who were sickened or killed by exposure to resistant Aspergillus were often already ill, and workers harmed by the procedures of flower growing were exposed by the nature of their jobs. But absent major changes in mass floriculture, those risks will remain.

Bo Dennis (left) and Catalina Rodriguez (right).

In the U.S., it is much less likely that small flower farmers will create risks for their workers or their communities. These small growers don’t have the land or equipment to field thousands of acres of identical flowers that may be overwhelmed by a single disease or pest. Nor are small growers compelled by contract to produce thousands of perfect stems to catch the market for graduation or Valentine’s Day. Both of those circumstances can drive up agrochemical use.

“The market has pretty much bifurcated into two streams,” says John Dole, a professor of horticultural science at North Carolina State University and an adviser to the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers. (“Specialty” designates less common flowers, outside the market domination of roses, chrysanthemums and carnations.) “We have the very large international growers, who ship primarily through Miami. They focus on low-­cost production. They are primarily supporting the big-­box stores, which would be grocery stores and mass-market wholesalers. Most U.S. growers are not facing competition from Colombia and Ecuador, simply because they’re growing different products.”

Without the pesticides and fungicides in use on large farms, workers and owners are safer, and research conducted on flower farms that grow organically or sustainably backs up the assumption that they are healthier for the environment, preserving the diversity of the soil microbiome. “Part of the reason these farms work fairly well is they mimic nature more closely,” Dole says. “Because of our diversified operations, we have a lot of insect pests. But we also have a lot of insect enemies.”

Dennis harvests a field of dahlias, each flower covered in a bag to shield it from the tarnished plant bug, a crop-destroying insect.

None of that would matter, of course, if small farms could not sell their product. “When I first started in this business, I would load my flowers into the back of my pickup truck and drive around to florists, and they would refuse categorically to buy local flowers,” says Kate Swift, a flower grower who has operated Cedar Farm Wholesale in New York’s Hudson Valley since 1997. “They felt that the quality was inferior. That’s how strong a hold overseas production had on the psyche of the buyer.”

By 2014, though, a USDA analysis pegged floriculture as the most lucrative product for most small farms (under 10 acres) in the U.S. that specialize in a class of crop, outpacing livestock, poultry and produce in earnings per acre. In 2024 two thirds of people responding to an annual survey by the National Gardening Association said they would preferentially buy local flowers to support family farms and keep agricultural jobs in their regions. Small flower farmers found customers first at farmers markets and among members of community-supported agriculture programs, then at local florists, and finally by linking up with restaurants and event designers where they could charge a premium—in some cases, as at Dandy Ram, by becoming farmer-­florists themselves.

To accomplish that, the farmers had to persuade their clients to embrace a new aesthetic: less polished and more primal, twining and frondy, founded on blossoms that might be too lush and soft to endure weeks of refrigerated storage but could be guaranteed to look and smell like nothing else. “I’m trying to convince other floral designers that what they really want are locally grown, beautiful, interesting, unique flowers,” says Stacy Brenner, a Maine state senator and one of the proprietors of Broadturn Farm in Scarborough, Me. “Trying to push them to think about shape and color and less about specific blooms, that you can make things look certain ways with color and texture, and you can use local flowers to do it.”

If this sounds like the journey of food production in the late 20th century—away from conventional agriculture and toward sustainable and regenerative farms growing heirloom vegetables and heritage breeds—the parallels are close. Debra Prinzing was a journalist writing about architecture and interiors for glossy magazines when she started to think about the provenance of flowers. The international Slow Food movement had launched 20 years earlier, and in the U.S., food activists had begun to talk about consuming only food raised within strict geographic limits. In 2007 novelist Barbara Kingsolver published the best-­selling Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about relocating her family to Appalachia so they could eat from their own property, and the New Oxford American Dictionary decreed “locavore” the word of the year.

In the floral design barn, Dennis arranges cut flowers.

Prinzing lives in Seattle, infamous for its short, dark, winter days—yet in the wet worst of that season, she would walk into local supermarkets and encounter bright cellophane-­wrapped bouquets that looked plucked from a summer field. The contrast jarred her. She wrote a book in 2012, The 50 Mile Bouquet, to support local flower production, and then a second the next year, Slow Flowers, borrowing the “slow food” nomenclature to provide a manifesto for local production. In 2014 she founded the Slow Flowers Society and directory to help consumers find designers and producers. It has 750 members now. “If someone was tied into understanding where their food came from, it wasn’t much of a leap for them to say flowers are a legitimate form of agriculture,” she says, calling slow flowers an attempt to “redefine what is beautiful and redefine that if you live in the seasons—­which is the slow food ethos as well­­—you are not going to have everything all the time, 24/7, 365 days a year.”

The benefit of the emergence of U.S. slow flowers extends beyond supporting the farms themselves. By offering an alternative to foreign flowers, they are creating economies where their products and their vision can find a home.

Cosmos and other cut flowers are made into bouquets at Dandy Ram Farm.

Before the collective began, the closest wholesale flower market was two states and 130 miles to the south in Chelsea, Mass., in Boston’s infamous traffic. “There was one in Bangor years ago, and it closed down,” says Sofia Oliver, the collective’s operations manager, tugging down a knit cap to protect against the chilly fragrant air. “Which I think was part of the reason a lot of growers and buyers started working together to get this collective started.”

Every week local flower growers—41, on this May afternoon—post whatever looks ready on the collective’s private site, and designers peruse the offerings and place orders. On a morning after orders close, the collective’s vans take off on long loops around the state, scooping up harvested flowers and delivering them to the shed for sorting. Once they are matched to their orders and rebucketed, the flowers go into the shed’s coolers and get delivered the next day. It makes up a web of selling and buying and connection, an economic network that, thanks to local flowers, stitches together the state.

The new economic opportunities that small farm flowers represent stretch across the country. Take Utah, where flower farms have proliferated from 18 in 2018 to 199 in 2023. Floriculture may fit well with local norms because it allows women to develop home-based businesses. “We have a lot of women who are household managers and primary caregivers,” says Melanie Stock, an associate professor and extension specialist at Utah State University’s College of Agriculture and Applied Sciences who surveys the industry. “It is such a premium, high-value crop, and they are entrepreneurs, so they are finding these small parcels of land and making it into a profitable business. It helps families out of underemployment without imposing associated childcare costs.”

And at its best, flower production allows farmers to extend to others the opportunities they have developed for themselves. For Dennis, owning Dandy Ram offers the possibility of bringing more LGBTQ people into agriculture. He and his partner have set aside some of their acreage to lease to brand-­new queer farmers, creating an incubator for those who cannot yet afford their own. “A big reason why I keep farming is to build community,” he says, “so we share land with a few people who are learning how to grow.”

The collective action, the support for others, the community building—as much as the flowers themselves, they are acts that bring beauty into the world. For flower farmers, it is especially poignant that these investments in the future arise from something so ephemeral. “It may look very glamorous from all of the things that people see and post online, but it’s definitely still difficult,” Oliver notes. But the blooms are worth it, she says: “Flowers are like food for the soul. They fill a different kind of need. Some people might think of them as frivolous, but they bring people joy.”

Blooms Away: The Real Price of Flowers. Carolyn Whelan; Scientific­American.com, February 12, 2009.
ScientificAmerican.com/archive

Maryn McKenna is a journalist specializing in public health, global health and food policy and is a contributing editor at Scientific American. She is author of Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats (National Geographic Books, 2017).

Source: www.scientificamerican.com