Favored Flowers:
Culture and Economy in a Global System
About
Billions of fresh-cut flowers are flown into the United States every year, allowing Americans to choose from a broad array of blooms regardless of the season. Favored Flowers is a lively investigation of this worldwide production and distribution of fresh cut flowers and their consumption in the New York metropolitan area. In a story filled with roses, orchids, and gerberas, flower auctions, new hybrids, new places and ways to grow flowers and new logistical systems to move them around the globe, Catherine Ziegler unravels important economic and cultural strands as she explores the recent globalization of the fresh flower trade. She provides a historical overview of the development of the cut flower industry in New York from the late nineteenth century to 1970, and on to its recent transformation from a domestic to a global industry.
As she points out, consumers use fresh cut flowers to send important signals about love, mourning, status and identity. Ziegler shows how flower consumers’ behavior and choices have changed over time and how they are shaped by the media and by the types of flowers and flower retailing available to them.
Ziegler interviewed more than 250 people as she followed flowers along the full length of the global commodity chain, from breeders in Europe to growers in Latin America and other parts of the world and finally to vases and wedding bouquets in and around New York. She examines the daily experiences of flower growers in the Netherlands and Ecuador, two leading exporters of flowers to the United States. Primary focus, though, is on others in the commodity chain: exporters, importers, traditional wholesale florists, retail florists, supermarkets and new retailers. She follows their activities as they respond to changing competition, supply, and shifts in consumer culture and consumer behavior in a market characterized by risk, volatility, and imperfect knowledge. By tracing changes in the wholesale and retail systems, she shows the recent development of two complementary commodity chains in New York and the United States generally. One leads to a high-end luxury market served by specialty florists and designers, and the other to a lower-priced mass market served by chain groceries, corner convenience stores, and retail superstores.
Comments and Reviews
“Catherine Ziegler has made an important contribution to our understanding of the intricate networks that make the global flower industry tick. Her history of the role that flowers have played in our culture is fascinating, and her analysis of supply chains, communication networks, and worldwide trends makes Favored Flowers an invaluable read for people inside the flower industry and for anyone who has ever picked up a bouquet and wondered about the story it had to tell.”—Amy Stewart, author of Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers
“What might it mean to offer a biography of an everyday commodity, at once attentive to its conditions of production and distribution and yet never losing sight, as Marx asserted, of its magic, mystery, and fetishistic qualities under capitalism? Catherine Ziegler’s marvelous book Favored Flowers tackles the extraordinary world of the global flower industry, tracing the complex sinews linking growers in the Netherlands and Ecuador to retailers and consumers in New York. She takes the reader for an exhilarating ride along the cut flower commodity chain, dirtying her hands in the greenhouses, interviewing middlemen and retail florists, and charting the floral contours of love and pleasure of the Upper East Side bourgeoisie. This is political and cultural economy of the highest order.”—Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley
“Favored Flowers is an excellent book, an extremely impressive and important piece of original research. A case-study of the contemporary commodity chain has been the ‘next big thing’ in anthropology, geography, and sociology for some time now, but this is one of the first studies that I have read that really lives up to the promise, including all the neglected middle sections of the chain. Here the wholesalers, the buyers, the packing, developing, storing, transporting, selecting, and distributing finally get the respect they deserve.”—Daniel Miller, editor of Materiality
Back to topThe Harmonious Garden:
Color, Form, and Texture
About
Catherine Ziegler describes fail-safe design methods—even novice gardeners can compose plant arrangements that successfully incorporate color, form and texture. The first section presents 149 integrated compositions. Ziegler fully describes the plants in each arrangement: botanical name, quantity and size, environment and USDA zones. Full-color photographs illustrate each composition, and the author discusses the key principles underlying each harmonious design. The second section offers more detailed information on these plants plus many others—annuals, perennials, bulbs, grasses, shrubs, and vines—with suggestions for successful design combinations.
Comments and Reviews
“It’s a rare gardening book that offers substance enough for the expert without intimidating the beginner: Ziegler accomplishes that feat with aplomb.” —Publishers Weekly
“Ziegler has commingled a vast knowledge of temperate plant materials with experience on color, form, texture, balance, scale, and design. …She has one thought in mind, to aid the gardener in achieving aesthetically compatible combinations on the very first attempt.” —HortScience
“The Harmonious Garden, which was recently reprinted in paperback, remains a classic. …Nothing is missing and everything is clearly written. An outstanding book on all counts.” —The Designer
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