3 Sordid Secrets about Flowers – Drugs, Stress and Fire
Drugs, stress and fire. They all share just one unlikely thing in common, flowers. Indeed, from bud to bouquet, a flower’s life is not quite as innocent as one would think…
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1) From The Netherlands with drugs
On occasion, the Dutch flower industry has been utilised by criminals as a cover for some of the most lucrative drug smuggling enterprises known to date.
Chrysanthemums and cannabis seems a highly unlikely coupling. Yet on March 10th 2010, British police unearthed a staggering ten tonnes of skunk with an estimated street value of £30 million in a farm near Swindon. A gang were found to have been purchasing boxes of chrysanthemums at the enormous international flower market at Naaldwijk near The Haig before concealing cannabis inside each and exporting them to Britain.
Cannabis is by no means an isolated drug in its occasional illegal relationship with the Dutch flower trade. Indeed, on September 15th 2010, the Spanish National Guard uncovered 120kg of speed masked in a shipment of Dutch flowers. The 400,000 doses of amphetamine sulphate were seized in time to prevent it flooding the market, a strategic move in the preservation of the Spanish population’s aesthetics, as the pictures below of methamphetamine users attests to.
Rest assured, the only drug with which the flower-buying public has any contact is the crucial plant-food used during the growing process to make flowers beautiful and long-lasting.
2) Dawn duels for the farmers’ jewels
It’s 6.30am and Europe is contemplating a shower over its morning coffee. Meanwhile, a fierce battle is underway in a small town in Holland where everything is at stake for those who dare to partake. The peaceful lakeside town of Aalsmeer boasts the largest flower auction in the world. The daily auction, frenetic, fast-paced and disturbingly competitive, is an event restricted to only the most stout-hearted members of our species.
After rising at an unseemly hour of the morning, 3000 buyers flock to the Aalsmeer auction house to make or break their fortunes in “the New York stock exchange of flowers”. Each morning upon entering an auction room, one will encounter an auditorium of anxious buyers, eyes frantically darting between the thirteen prominent clocks above and the convoy of flower laden carts below.
The clocks, invented by a Dutch cauliflower grower in the 1870’s, rapidly tick down the price of the displayed batch of flowers. In order to buy the flowers, a buyer must press a button on their desk which freezes the price at its point on the fast-moving clock. Press too soon and the price paid will be too high, press too late and the competitor to your side will have beaten you to the bunch. Either way, a mistake will prove costly.
3) Fiery funeral for a flower
A fiery end awaits those ill-starred flowers which remain unsold at the culmination of the auction. These hapless flowers enter a frightening incinerator, never to grace a table.
As the auction sets a minimum price for each group of flowers, if no buyer stops the clock before it lowers beneath this price, the flowers are deemed unsold and are burnt. Greater numbers of flowers meet this fiery fate during the summer months when the flower yield is greatest yet holiday-making Europe exerts less demand. On a happier note, growers are paid this minimum price by the auction, a Dutch rose earning €0.05 for example.
Filed under: General, International Flowers on October 21st, 2011
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