February 13, 202518 min readThe Beauty of Slow Flowers versus the Pretty Poison of Plants Grown with Dangerous ChemicalsNew slow flower farms grow beautiful bloomswithout health-harming chemicals used by overseas operations that dominate the U.S. flower marketBy Maryn McKenna edited by Josh FischmanDahlias bloom at the Maine Flower Collective, a group of local growers. Jesse BurkeOn 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 were 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 Maya date when those popular flowers wont yet have bloomed in Maine. I will say, Great! Have a good celebration. I dont think were the vendor for you.What Dennis grows wont be found among the blooms that cram the entrances of supermarkets, big-box stores, downtown floristsmost 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.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.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 wasnt protected. And in the Netherlands, prolific use of antifungals on the countrys 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 Denniss 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 modela 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 beautyungroomed, imperfect, unpredictableback 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 Mexicos Day of the Deadand 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 perfectalthough 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 Maines Dandy Ram Farm protects a delicate dahlia from pests, avoiding the use of chemicals.Jesse BurkeIn 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 drugs 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 its about 22 percent, says Camron King, CEO of the trade group Certified American Grown. That decline represents an economic burdenand, 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 arent 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.Jose Ricardo Surez, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego, saw the changes the tariff exemptions brought. His parents, both academics, are from Ecuador. The family moved around, but when they were in his parents home country, they often visited Pedro Moncayo cantn, a county perched in Ecuadors Andean foothills. Surez remembers the high green landscape and how abruptly it changed in the 1990s: All of a sudden, these greenhouses started popping up in many different parts of the county.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 dont 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 Surez 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.Jesse BurkeIn 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, Surez says. Weve 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 theyre not: They have windows because you need some circulation of air, so the pesticide is not contained just within the crop.The study launched with a cohort of 313 children between four and nine years old and then expanded. Approximately half of the kids lived in the same household as workers from flower plantations. The children contributed blood and urine samples, underwent medical exams, and participated in neurological and behavioral assessments. The team began publishing results in 2012. From the beginning, they found problems in the children of flower-farm households that those with no farm connection did not share: first, changes in enzyme levels that affect neurotransmitters and indicate pesticide exposureand later, effects on learning ability, depression, thyroid function and blood pressure. In one especially poignant result, they found that children linked to flower farms experienced months-long damage to attention, self-control, and eye-hand coordination after one of the biggest spraying episodes of the year: the lead-up to the harvest to make Mothers Day bouquets.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 havent been any changes in regulations when it comes to pesticide use, Surez 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.Surez and his fellow investigators have tried to do so also. His parents, physician-epidemiologist Jose Surez-Torres and anthropologist Dolores Lopez Paredes, created a local organization, Fundacin Cimas del Ecuador, that gathers international funding for educational exchanges and local initiatives. Perceiving that flower production doesnt produce anything nutritious and also sends its products out of the country, the foundation sought to demonstrate another vision of agriculture, creating an organic produce farm where more than 3,000 teens and young adults have received training in agroecology. You have to give workers an alternative, Surez says. You cant just say, Well, dont work in flowers.Other researchers have focused on risks run by the workers themselves. Two decades ago epidemiologist Jinky Leilanie Lu, now a research professor at the University of the Philippines Manila, documented physical and neurological symptomschills and fever, dizziness and headache, for examplein about one third of workers whose jobs were mixing and spraying pesticides on flower farms. In 2009 researchers at the University of New Mexico and the University of Michigan reported on high miscarriage rates among the large number of women who worked in the Ecuadorian flower industry. They had a 2.6 times greater risk of miscarriage than other women. In 2015 a paper about flower greenhouse workers in Ethiopia uncovered a series of health troubles. The country had experienced an explosion of rose cultivation over 10 years thanks to its mild climate and high elevation, going from a tiny industry to the fourth-largest exporter in the world. The research found that a large number of workers had rashes and other skin problems, and some had chronic coughs and shortness of breath.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 cytokinessmall 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.Jesse BurkeThe 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 pesticidesespecially on rosesthat 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 agriculturalchemicals, 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 dont 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.Jesse BurkeBut 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 antifungalsand their organisms displayed an identical genetic pattern even in patients hospitalized many miles from one another.An informal strike force of physicians and microbiologists assembled to investigate the problem. If patients were suffering from azole-resistant infections yet had never received azoles in health care, the fungi that had taken hold in their bodies must have been exposed to antifungal compounds somewhere else firstand that exposure must have been common enough, across the Netherlands, to exert the same selective pressure everywhere at the same time.The answer, it turned out, was flowers: the tulips that the Netherlands is famous for and the other bulb-making blooms, lilies and hyacinths and alliums, in which it leads the world. At the same time that medicine was benefiting from the new class of azole drugs, agriculture had been using a class of fungicides based on the same chemical structure. Bulbs planted in the Netherlands, grown to flowering and then harvested for sale around the world, were dipped into azoles or sprayed with the fungicides to protect the investment they represented. That blanket distribution had found its way to Aspergillus in discarded plants and compost heaps of trimmed foliage, and the spores of the newly resistant fungi had been breathed in by patients and made them untreatably ill.By processes that no one has fully definedsimultaneous evolution, or international sales of plants and bulbs, or fungal spores carried on the windlethal 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).Jesse BurkeIn the U.S., it is much less likely that small flower farmers will create risks for their workers or their communities. These small growers dont 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 Valentines 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 theyre growing different products.Out of preference and for differentiation in the marketplace, many small-scale flower farmers follow organic principles, such as no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, although they may not pursue the years-long process to get USDA organic certification. Getting that designation is expensive, so a lot of people say that they grow responsibly, sustainably, says Val Schirmer, president of the specialty growers association and a founder of Three Toads Farm in central Kentucky. Most of our growers dont want to use pesticides. They are much more likely to use beneficial insects and to improve their habitat, like for birds. (Instead of the USDA route, some farmers opt instead for Certified Naturally Grown, a peer-reviewed process developed for small farms that allows growing flowers for which no organic seed is available.)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.Jesse BurkeNone 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 Yorks Hudson Valley since 1997. They felt that the quality was inferior. Thats 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 premiumin 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. Im 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 centuryaway from conventional agriculture and toward sustainable and regenerative farms growing heirloom vegetables and heritage breedsthe 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.Jesse BurkePrinzing lives in Seattle, infamous for its short, dark, winter daysyet 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 wasnt 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 seasonswhich is the slow food ethos as wellyou 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.On a sunny spring afternoon, vans pull up to a low white clapboard building on Crystal Spring Farm in Brunswick, Me., a historic property marked at the roadside by a long horizontal sign of a big wood carrot with a bite taken out. The vans unload bucket after bucket of paper-wrapped sheaves of flowers: delicate lily of the valley and glowing pink bleeding hearts, refined pale-blue nigella, smooth and frilly tulips in purple and apricot, branches of lilac and beech and peach and apple blossoms, and dozens more colors and types. The sheaves come from farms; inside the shed, workers assess their contents and sort them into new buckets to match 24 pages of orders tacked to the wood walls. Each order comes from a florist who placed it in the previous few days on the software platform of the Maine Flower Collective, a member-owned cooperative launched in 2023 that aggregates the products of local growers to make them easier for local designers to buy.Cosmos and other cut flowers are made into bouquets at Dandy Ram Farm.Jesse BurkeBefore the collective began, the closest wholesale flower market was two states and 130 miles to the south in Chelsea, Mass., in Bostons infamous traffic. There was one in Bangor years ago, and it closed down, says Sofia Oliver, the collectives 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 growers41, on this May afternoonpost whatever looks ready on the collectives private site, and designers peruse the offerings and place orders. On a morning after orders close, the collectives 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 sheds 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 Universitys 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 buildingas 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 its 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.