When I began learning how to farm flowers in earnest, in 2008, at 26, I joined a relatively small but incredibly talented contingent of surviving domestic flower growers — flower farms around the country that hadn’t succumbed to the global market forces that allowed cheap flowers to flood the local market and undercut prices. As you might have learned by now, 80% of the flowers we have access to purchase here in the US are imported from countries overseas” in the US, primarily Ecuador and Columbia, but also as far afield as South America, Japan, Vietnam and elsewhere. Of course, that doesn’t make those foreign flowers bad – in fact, they’re quite amazing. One stroll down 28th Street in New York City is a testimony to the incredible skill of flower growers around the world. As a result, the flowers we see in our corner stores, supermarkets and most florist shops have that impeccable (almost too perfect, in IMHO) look to them. They’re nice, but somehow not as transcendent as those fresh garden roses, complete with their intoxicating aroma and thorns that we see in a neighbor’s garden plot or the Brooklyn Botani’s Rose Garden. We don’t know who grew these stems; we often don’t know what conditions workers were in; and we often can’t tell whether those flowers were grown using organic or sustainable methods.