Radial symmetry in an African daisy (Gerbera sp.), imaged with a flatbed scanner
Radial symmetry in an African daisy (Gerbera sp.), imaged with a flatbed scanner
Six of us pushed our way through the crowded metal benches and aisles past hanging bromeliads (plants in the pineapple family) and orchids of every imaginable color, including the tiniest flowers of wild, untamed species. We’d wandered away from the main group of one hundred revelers enjoying beer and wine in the heat of the afternoon. After all, this was a Tucson botanical tradition, the 33rd Annual Summer Solstice Celebration, many of which I’d attended over the years. The invitation boasted that the event would be “a gathering of xerophytes, heliotherms, and other extremophiles.” I chuckled at this jargon-rich terminology. Such words are used to describe drought-adapted and sun-loving desert plants, ones living on the edge.
The place for the party was the Old Pueblo, near my home in Tucson. Every year our green-thumb host for this famous party is one and the same, botanist and plant breeder Dr. Mark Dimmitt. Mark’s annual solstice parties are famous, almost a Tucson institution. The partygoer mix included owners of native-plant nurseries, die-hard fans of succulents and other bizarre plants, University of Arizona professors and students, Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum employees, and local artists and musicians. Here the weird-plant faithful gather once a year among Mark’s amazing collection. His famous “pot” parties are invariably scheduled on or within a few days of the summer solstice under the blazing Tucson sun. Despite the oppressive temperatures, the attendees have come to reconnect and chat, and most important, to admire his amazing collection of exotic plants, rare succulents such as the Karoo roses, other desert plants, and especially the orchids and bromeliads. The event is almost like an art opening, with everyone admiring flowering plants in the ground and in pots as they would visit an art gallery to view paintings on a wall. I crept through the tangled orchid and bromeliad house making my way toward the back of the overflowing plant menagerie. I continued hunting rare orchid blooms with my digital camera, macro lens, and flash and encountering old friends.
On another visit to Mark Dimmitt’s greenhouses, I’d come to learn about plant breeding firsthand. My friend has a greenhouse devoted exclusively to species and varieties of Karoo rose (Adenium). These plants came originally from African deserts. They are grown for their bizarre, gnarled, and elephantine forms, and for their spectacularly colorful blossoms that remind people of frangipani (Karoo roses and frangipani belong to the same dogbane family, Apocynaceae). As I walked along the greenhouse isles, I noticed that many plump buds were scantily clothed in thin bridal-veil netting. Since part of his greenhouse is open to the desert, these veiled bags kept out local pollinators hungry for pollen and nectar. The only pollinator allowed inside was the one wearing the floppy sun hat, Dimmitt himself. Carrying a small notebook, plastic vials, strands of red yarn, and a small camel’s-hair paintbrush, Mark selected his flowers. Aha, that bud wasn’t open yesterday. Mark moved in, gently removing the net bag. He plucked off the fat anthers one by one, storing them in a small glass vial. This flower would become one of his pollen-donor fathers for the hand pollinations he would make.
“Crossing” is the placing of donor pollen from one flower (like sperm from an animal father) onto the female receptive stigma of a different, usually unrelated, mother plant. Like bees on two legs, plant breeders often do their work holding a camel’s-hair brush dipped into a vial of freshly collected pollen. Once the sperm in the pollen tube meets the egg, hidden inside the immature seed, the tube releases its sperm to the egg cell, they unite, and the combined chromosomes are shuffled, called crossing over. When they’ve ripened, the fruits are opened, and their seeds are collected and planted. The mature plants from these crosses are screened for their desirable characteristics, defects, or faults. Further crosses are made to improve, stabilize, or expand upon the desirable phenotypic traits (the plants’ appearance), such as altered or intensified floral colors or an increased number of petals.
Mark moved to another Adenium and selected a netted beauty. This one had been emasculated in the bud stage. Previously, Mark had forced the bud open and nipped off the pollen-containing anthers. Now, the open flower was a sort of floral eunuch. It could no longer function as a male, but these flowers, like most, are bisexual, and its pistil was ready. Dipping his paintbrush into the vial of oily pollen, he gently swiped the gold-dust-like pollen across the sticky end of the now-receptive female stigma. No fanfare, no cigarette or afterglow; nonetheless, this was plant sex. His surrogate-pollinator role fulfilled, the pollen he’d added would fertilize the immature seeds within the ovary. Mark tagged the cross he’d just made with the name and number of the plants’ parents.
If everything went right, a long, skinny fruit would develop. A few years later, he would have planted the seeds from this forced sexual union, grown out the plants to flowering age, and waited. Almost like an expectant father, Mark wanted to know if he’d made the right choices, or how the genes had reshuffled. Only then would Mark be the proud foster parent of a new Adenium floral hybrid, perhaps a combination of shape and colors not previously seen, either in nature or any greenhouse. Such is the way of independent plant breeders around the world, ever hopeful that they will create, with understanding and a bit of luck, a brand-new and exciting flower for the global floriculture markets.
Plants are sexual organisms, but they lead sedentary lives and move on a timescale much too slow for us to notice. Furthermore, their pollen grains and the receptive tip of their pistils are best observed under magnification. That’s why it took a long time for the scientific world, then gardeners, and eventually everyone else to catch on that plants make sperm (enclosed within pollen grains) that fertilize ovules, much like animal reproduction. Some European botanists, including Englishmen John Ray (1627–1705) and Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712), made observations leading them to believe that plants engaged in sexual reproduction and that pollen was the male agent. A German botanist, Rudolf Jacob Camerarius (1665–1721), conducted the first critical garden experiments on sexuality in flowering plants. A physician and a botanist, he became director of the botanical gardens at Tübingen, Germany. Among other studies, Camerarius observed mulberry trees, castor-oil plants, spinach, maize, and Mercury plants (Mercurialis). He discovered that if female mulberries grew at a great distance from the nearest male trees, they bore empty fruits without seeds. Similarly, when he cut off the male flowers, the tassels, of maize (corn), no seeds formed on the “female” cobs. These European scientists were only rediscovering what Asiatic date-palm farmers had known for thousands of years. Obviously, various cultures discovered plant sexuality at different times and stages of their botanical enlightenment.
The earliest plant breeder to use what we would recognize today as scientific methods was a German investigator, Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter (1733–1806), one of the most important biologists of the eighteenth century. He was the first scientist to hybridize plants and study them systematically. His earliest subjects were tobacco plants (Nicotiana rustica and N. paniculata). Later, Kölreuter made crosses and produced hybrid plants between different species of carnations (Dianthus), four-o’clocks (Mirabilis), and mullein (Verbascum). He observed these hybrids and noted that the plants were intermediate in form between the two parents in most ways. However, Kölreuter also noted that his hybrids were never quite as fertile as their parents. By backcrossing hybrids to one of their parental species, the next generation looked more like the original, wild progenitor.
Almost everyone knows about Luther Burbank (1849–1926) and his russet Burbank potato, especially ardent fans of McDonald’s french fries. Making hand crosses in the manner of traditional plant breeding, Burbank, “the wizard of horticulture,” created dozens of new varieties of fruits and vegetables, along with the much-beloved Shasta daisy and ninety-one other types of ornamental plants. Similarly, today many plant breeders are working to modify agricultural crops and ornamental plants at universities and government and private horticultural laboratories around the world.
The hybridizing work of Kölreuter was taken up by a number of scientists and amateurs in the nineteenth century, such as Burbank. Some competed for prizes, bringing their best crosses to affairs known as florists’ feasts, while others shared their breeding records and data with Charles Darwin. Throughout the twentieth century professional scientists determined that naturally occurring hybridization between closely related wild species was surprisingly common. In nature, hybrids typically do not evolve into new species, but hybrids do survive for years and years as living gene banks for one or both parental species. When a bee transfers pollen between a parent species and its hybrid, this backcrossing allows new genes to filter into the parent population. If this occurs many times over several generations, this may trigger the evolution of a new plant species. This process, known as introgression, may be responsible for the origins of many of our American species of sunflowers (Helianthus), Louisiana irises, prickly pears (Opuntia), and beardtongues (Penstemon).
Likewise, hybrids occurred within European and Chinese gardens for centuries whenever people collected and grew a range of wildflowers, bushes, and even trees. After pollinating bees “married” these different species, gardeners and orchardists kept their seeds for later propagation or conserved the seedlings that arose spontaneously in cultivated flower beds. This brought about some of our first garden daffodils (Narcissus), polyanthus (Primula), and soulangeana magnolias (Magnolia). Many garden hybrids are so old that no records exist about who first made or grew them, or where. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries horticulturists made hybrids between wild species, only to be astonished that they were merely re-creating ancient garden-flower favorites. Botanists who classify plants had to do something about the scientific names they’d given to these old mongrels.
If you see a plant tag in a garden shop in which the genus and species are interrupted by a lowercase x (meaning “times” or “crossed with”), you know it’s an old garden hybrid posing as a true species. That blue-purple salvia you like so much is Salvia x superba because it is the result of S. nemorosa crossed (hybridized) with S. sylvestris. The common garden gladiolus is Gladiolus x gandavensis. A single gladiolus flower carries gene combinations from at least four distinct wild species. A fifth species is involved if your gladiolus flower has contrasting spots or blotches on its lower petals. Plant pedigrees can be as complicated as tracking down your own family ancestry and genealogy.
Curiously, hybrid plant origins were something horticulturists often tried to conceal in the not-so-good-old days. In parts of Western Europe and America, hybrid plants were often regarded as ungodly, or certainly at least unnatural and to be avoided. Prideful man was not permitted to ape his Creator by producing a new kind of living thing. Even Shakespeare was no fan of hybrid plants. His charming heroine Perdita (in The Winter’s Tale) points out the beauty of spring-blooming flowers to her friends until one asks her about cultivated, “pied” (harlequin) carnations. She will simply not have them. They are nature’s bastards! This sounds ridiculous today, but even Luther Burbank told a story about how a minister, posing as Burbank’s friend, denounced him from the pulpit for flouting God’s laws by creating hybrids. It seems that Burbank’s Shasta daisy, proudly grown in American gardens for more than a century, is not so innocent a bloom despite its many, pure-white “chaste” petals.
Flower lovers around the world have their favorite blooms. It all depends on whether the buyer wants his prized flowers displayed in a vase or grown in a pot or an outdoor flower bed. Floral preferences vary widely between countries, cultures, and different historical periods. When it comes to bouquets, roses, especially red roses, are clear winners in the United States. The USDA’s Economic Research Service records and tabulates flowers sold for the florist industry. Not surprisingly, roses, grown mostly in California, beat out carnations (at number two), chrysanthemums (number three), and the parrot feathers (Alstroemeria) (in fourth place). Although parrot feathers are comparatively recent arrivals, derived from wildflowers native to temperate South America, they are valued for their long vase life. That may be the reason why the shorter-lived tulips, as cut blooms, are now in fifth place, followed by gerbera daisies (Gerbera). True lilies (Lilium), glads (Gladiolus), irises (Iris), and baby’s breath (Gypsophila) follow in turn. Fads, pricing, and a flower’s introduction to mainstream horticulture have all contributed to changes in rankings and popularity over the decades.
Roses are also most popular in the United Kingdom, but there lilies come next, followed by the sweetly scented freesias (Freesia), derived from wild bulbs native to southern Africa. Next, the British favor tulips, followed by sweet peas, various orchids, carnations, sunflowers, and crown anemones. If we travel to Japan, we find floral arrangements incorporating moss pinks (Shibazakura, moss Phlox) among European favorites such as tulips, roses, and lavender. Japanese parks showcase the traditional sakura cherry (Prunus serrulata). The Japanese enjoy their centuries-old pastime of flower viewing and picnicking (called hanami) under blooming cherry trees. Spring cherry blossoms are the most popular, but the people of Japan know that every season brings blossoms worthy of admiration. In China, though, plum blossoms are even more popular than flowering cherry trees. Chinese gardens reveal a deep traditional admiration for their peonies, chrysanthemums, native Cymbidium orchids, China rose (Rosa chinensis), camellias, azaleas, lotuses, and the fragrant olive (Osmanthus). During their New Year’s spring festival the water-fairy flower makes its appearance as a forced bulb in artistic ceramic planters, but she is nothing but a hybrid narcissus imported ages ago from Mediterranean lands.
Orchid fanatics often express different passions in different countries. Americans still clamor for hybrids based on crossing cattleyas to laelias to brassias and their allies, giving us variations on the ultimate high school prom corsage. The Brits are more likely to culture sprays of those big, tropical, multiflowered terrestrial cymbidiums. And down under, Australian tastes appear to be shifting from cymbidiums to the native tropical-Asian Dendrobium orchids.
When it comes to gardening at home, Americans are more likely to plant their garden beds using flowering plants that differ somewhat from the favorites of the cut-flower trade. We do, however, preserve our loyalties for the rose. Rosebushes remain top sellers at nurseries, although suburbanites invariably find them challenging to grow and keep healthy. The second most popular garden flowers are, ironically, the annual and almost unkillable zinnias (Zinnia). Lilac bushes (Syringa) are in third place, followed by tulips, and finally there is a wide choice among irises. This list varies in different parts of our country since we have so many different plant-hardiness zones along with regional preferences for flowers. For example, commercial growers in Florida spend most of their time propagating annual bedding plants such as Impatiens, Petunia, Geranium (from cuttings), Geranium (from seeds), marigold (Tagetes), and various hybrids sold as pansies (Viola x wittrockiana). Our current top five bestselling American perennials are daylilies (Hemerocallis), followed by coneflowers (Echinacea), black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia fulgida), plantain lilies (Hosta), Salvia, and purple coral bells (Heuchera micrantha). However, plantain lilies are grown more often for their brilliantly colored leaves than for their equally conspicuous white or pink blooms. Hostas are among our few garden plants that thrive in deeply shaded areas, unless you are keen on nonflowering ferns as part of your garden greenery.
A secretive and global network of eccentric plant collectors, fanciers of rare orchids, cycads, bonsai, cacti and other succulents, carnivorous plants, and large-specimen plants, exists largely out of view. In some cases, plants may have been illegally collected and imported. Wealthy Asian, European, and US collectors sometimes fall into this world of obsessive plant collecting. Recent books, including The Orchid Thief, The Scent of Scandal, or Orchid Fever, detail the surreal world of uncommon flowering plants, and the often extravagant prices that some will pay to possess these rare beauties. With the recent global economic downturn, the public may have less discretionary money to buy flowers or rare specimen plants, let alone afford the expense and high maintenance of building or caring for even a small private greenhouse or solarium. Recently, many orchid-growing nurseries have gone out of business from lack of support from middle-class orchid hobbyists, or from competition from orchids sold for ridiculously low prices in supermarkets and hardware stores. Yet, a few ultrawealthy, fanatical collectors still fulfill their desires for unfamiliar blooms at any price.
If you live or have lived in rural areas of the United States or abroad, wildflowers have generally been available free for the picking. Flowers have always been inexpensive gifts for rural cottagers and small farmers. Older English friends of mine remember how they were encouraged to pick wayside cowslips (Primula), along with violets and lady’s-smocks (Cardamine), in the early spring. Bouquets of these were presented to relatives in nearby towns and cities. Until recently, similar flower gathering has happened on this side of the big pond. Schoolchildren and lovers have always gathered up wildflowers as gifts. Of course, plucking any wildflowers, or seed heads, in state and national parks is taboo. Conservation laws in the United Kingdom and the United States have wisely stopped individuals and a few commercial interests from gathering up scarce wildflowers, thereby protecting common and rare species alike.
Until recently, flowers have mostly been luxurious and expensive commodities for city dwellers because of their short life spans, rarity, tenderness, and difficulty of being shipped long distances or held more than a few days in transit. Not prized as edible commodities, flowers nevertheless create unique beauty and add value in our natural and living environments, providing enjoyment for everyone. In past centuries, cultivating flowers to cut or growing bedding plants for gardening or decorating home or public-building interiors was prohibitively expensive except for wealthy merchants or royal families.
In seventeenth-century Holland (peaking in the spring of 1636), bulbs of the rarest tulip varieties such as the Viceroy or Semper Augustus (only twelve bulbs were known in 1624) sold for as a much as 4,150 guilders at a time when even the most skilled artisan was fortunate to earn 300 guilders per year. During this famous tulipmania, one rare flame-tulip bulb could sell for as much as a fancy canal house. The skyrocketing prices were for bulbs while they bloomed in pots. Buyers likely believed it was a grand investment because tulip bulbs, with proper care, multiply by making daughter bulbs (offsets). Or perhaps the purchaser thought he could raise a new generation from seeds.
The rare flame tulips (see the dust-jacket art of this book) were actually plants infected with a virus that produced the broken-effect, streaking colors in the pigment cells within their petals. However, since each virus caused different colors in the flower, the buyer lived under the delusion that he or she had purchased a one-of-a-kind plant and cornered its market.
Tulip flowers were among the most highly prized status symbols in Dutch society. Successful Dutch bulb traders might earn as much as sixty-thousand florins in one month, the astonishing equivalent of $61,700 in today’s currency. One could never have enough of the prized blooms. Wealthy Dutch citizens placed cleverly concealed mirrors in their gardens to increase their apparent riches. Today, the members of the Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society are dedicated to preserving and exhibiting the rare broken-feather or flame-type tulips like those from 1630s Holland.
Almost no flowers today can match the excessive prices paid for fancy tulips in mid-seventeenth-century Holland before the tulip speculation bubble finally burst in the winter of 1636–37. For discriminating buyers, however, today’s global market offers some pricey flowers. Horticulture and floriculture can indeed be expensive hobbies. Fortunately tulip bulbs no longer command astronomical prices as they are easily mass-produced. Even the most sought-after bulbs rarely cost more than a dollar apiece. Many print or online bulb catalogs sell tulips for only forty to fifty cents each. They are even cheaper when you buy them in twenty-, fifty-, or hundred-bulb lots as most gardeners do. Today, the most expensive bulbs belong to other genera and species.
A small tuber of a Japanese rice-cake flower (Arisaema sikokianum) sells for as much as $40. It’s an aroidlike plant similar to the jack-in-the-pulpit. Members of this genus are now fashionable since they prefer shady areas and have striking patterns on their hooded floral spathes. A single bulb of the giant Himalayan lily (Cardiocrinum giganteum) will cost $20 each, and you are buying a four- or five-year-old bulb. Why? It simply takes that long for the bulb to store up enough energy to bloom. They flower and then promptly die. You can keep their seeds and start again, but it’s another six-to-seven-year wait for a flowering stem to appear.
Cut blooms can be just as expensive to buy, and they wither and die in a short time. Visiting any gourmet market or high-end florist shop reveals high-priced, but not exorbitantly so, cut-flower stems. King proteas, originally from South Africa, are now grown in Hawaii or Australia commercially and sell for about $10 per stem. Stargazer or Siberian lilies ($8 each), torch gingers ($8), bird-of-paradise (Strelitzia, at a modest $4), anthuriums ($6), and tall heliconias (banana relatives, up to $15 apiece) have high prices. These are, however, mere “throwaway” blossoms compared to a few recent notables.
Currently, the top contenders for the world’s priciest plants, not surprisingly, are orchids, especially when they’re sold at auction. A modern hybrid, the Shenzhen Nongke, is a Cymbidium variety (terrestrial orchids originally from montane-to-low, tropical Asia), but it sold at auction in 2005 for a staggering 160,000 British pounds sterling ($262,112) to a single Japanese bidder. Amazingly, this green, purple, and fringed orchid flower doesn’t look all that glamorous. Rare, wild orchids also command top prices. On the slopes of the tallest mountain on the island of Borneo, Mt. Kinabalu, in the Malaysian state of Sabah, lives Rothschild’s slipper orchid (Paphiopedilum rothschildianum), an endangered species now found only on a few mountain acres. This slow-growing species takes up to fifteen years before flowering. When it has been produced and infrequently offered for sale, individual plants have sold for as much as $5,000. Phragmipedium kovachii is another tropical slipper native to South America. It was smuggled into the United States not in compliance with international CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) regulations. It created many scandals, leading to both prosecution and embarrassment for the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida. When it first came to the United States around 2002, it sold for between $5,000 and $10,000 per plant. Following mass propagation, the showy plants now sell for a more modest $350 each.
Japanese collectors love one of their rarest native species, the furan (rich and noble) orchid (Neofinetia falcata). These handsome, small, white orchids were favored by shoguns and samurai in the past. Their delicate blooms have a six-inch-long nectar spur and are pollinated by long-tongued moths at night. Today, small Neofinetia plants from a California producer sell for as much as $250. Just a few years ago, however, several of these orchids were sold by a producer in Japan for $250,000 per plant. One of the buyers of this rare orchid, at his death and according to his last wishes, was buried along with his pricey orchid. Today, with tissue-culture propagation, most of these rare orchids are still extravagant for the average orchid hobbyist but don’t sell for outrageous amounts.
If you’re an independent orchid breeder and exhibit your prize specimens at national or international plant shows, and your specimen is judged best of show, that can put real money in your pocket. This is especially true if your orchid wins a First Class Certificate or Award of Merit, one of the few, coveted annual awards from the American Orchid Society. In fact, you can almost take it to the bank. Suddenly, your $50 orchid is a national social media star, perhaps even world famous, and clamored after by many eager buyers. People everywhere are tweeting about it. Now, it might fetch $5,000, instead of mere pocket change.
Vase life is the term the cut-flower industry uses to describe how long cut flowers, or foliage, retain their healthy appearance in a vase after they’re sold. Plant breeders are always on the lookout for flowers with longer vase lives. A slow and lingering death is preferred, and highly profitable. I admire and enjoy parrot feathers (Alstroemeria) along with various orchids because they often remain fresh more than a week following floral decapitation. Most orchid flowers are built to last anyway. They wear a thick, waxy cuticle to retard evaporation and are reinforced with many woody veins providing water and internal support.
However, other commercial cut flowers must be primed before shipment. This includes dunking them in buckets or spraying them with harsh preservative chemicals, especially roses exported from South America. These cut flowers are then stored in low-temperature warehouses with controlled atmospheres, narrowly limiting humidity, oxygen, and carbon dioxide levels. The main benefit of controlled-atmosphere storage is the active suppression of the plant’s ripening and death hormone, ethylene gas. Amazingly, the roses you bought for your sweetheart or mother on Valentine’s Day may have been picked in Ecuador or Colombia way back in December, then held, chilled, for as long as two or three months in controlled-atmosphere warehouses until they’re purchased, then shipped, just before February 14. Few customers ever guess that their Valentine’s Day red roses are the Methuselahs of the cut-flower world.
During harvesting, trimming, packaging, and transportation, cut flowers are subjected to many physical abuses. All the jostling, bouncing, wrapping, and being stuffed into tight cartons create large and small abrasions and breaks in their tissues. These plant wounds produce and release the colorless, odorless ethylene (C2H4) molecule we met earlier.
If you put a rock-hard, unripe pear inside a paper bag with a ripe apple, the pear will ripen faster. That’s because apples are champion producers of ethylene, sending the gas out through special pores on their peels. Apples are also the reason any good florist will frown and shake his or her head inside many supermarkets. Invariably, the market’s produce department proudly displays their cut flowers next to the fruit bins, then wonders why the flowers don’t last as long as they did before. The role of ethylene gas as a fruit-ripening hormone has been known since 1935, and the gas can be generated by burning organic fuels, including kerosene. Ripening by burning fuel was a tradition in some ancient cultures. Supposedly, ancient Egyptians gassed their figs, while the Chinese burned incense in closed rooms to enhance the ripening of pea pods.
With flowers, it’s a bit different. Ethylene is the chemical trigger that signals the flower to change from maiden to matron. It’s time for Cinderella to shed her delicate petals and become a fat pumpkin, or another fruit. The fertilization of an ovary by pollen tubes containing sperm is a potent trigger stimulating ethylene production by the parent plant. Once the flower is exposed to ethylene, it aborts its petals and the tips of the sexual organs shrivel. The surviving ovary expands as the parent plant gives it more water, and ripening seeds within make the young fruit bulge. Think of a rose flower and those wide, succulent rose hips that develop after the pretty petals shrivel.
Now that the complete genomes of popular flowers, such as petunias, have been elucidated, plant breeders have begun to use their genomic maps to attack formerly intractable problems, such as ethylene sensitivity. In effect, this is a trick to make petunias unaware they’ve just had sex by making them less sensitive, or totally insensitive, to ethylene. Early genetic-modification experiments have resulted in petunia flowers that hold their petals four or even ten times longer. So far, it has been easier for producers and packers to use ethylene-blocking chemical sprays, or to include “ethylene-scrubbing” packets with the flowers they ship. Perhaps in the future, imaginative breeders will give us ethylene-immune blossoms that don’t require drenching in toxic chemicals before being air-shipped to buyers in the United States and elsewhere.
Flower breeders are always trying to improve their existing cultivars and new varieties for the marketplace. The top priorities now include changing genes so our flowers are showier (more intense colors and more petals), have greater disease resistance, and produce flowers that live far longer after being cut to better survive harvesting and shipping before they reach a florist shop. But the chemical, temperature, and atmosphere tricks discussed previously are not enough to produce a durable flower. Yes, grandmother had her own techniques for making roses in bowls last longer, but not everyone today recuts flower stems, changes water, or dissolves an aspirin or plant food in the water as he or she should. Please refer to appendix 3 for what you should be doing.
Plant breeders try to select for longer-lasting blooms, seemingly impossible when considering something as ephemeral as flowers. As usual, some tropical orchids live longest as cut flowers in a vase. The flower of a moth orchid (Phalaenopsis spp.) may live for a couple of weeks in a vase or five to eight months if left as an unpollinated flower on a potted plant. Other orchids such as hybrid cymbidiums, with their tough, almost woody stems, may persist for weeks in vases of clean water. Under natural conditions, orchids and roses may produce dozens or more unique scent molecules in the same flower. Fragrance, unfortunately, is something that breeders don’t try to preserve and is often lost quickly through genetic modification because most flowers must go through several biochemical pathways to make only one fragrance molecule. Thus we have the lovely but unscented Leonidas roses.
Just after dawn, I found that the flower market was already abuzz, not with pollinators, but wholesale flower vendors, prospective buyers, and curious, flower-struck, wandering individuals, gawkers like myself and my partner, Kay, there to smell the roses, and hoping to get a great deal on a bouquet or entire bucket of magnificent freshly cut blooms. None of us went away disappointed, or without a few new acquisitions.
Taking time to introduce myself and speaking with several of the vendors gave me a sense of the place, its long history, and what the flower workers thought of their jobs, working day after day surrounded by all this natural beauty, and, as it occurred to me later, what it takes to be successful as a merchant of floral sexual organs.
Surprisingly, the market didn’t smell like flowers; it was different, with an overriding “green” aroma emanating from leaves and the juicy surfaces of cut stems. Sure, there were floral overtones, but they all blended together into something generic or artificial. If I wanted to inhale the fragrance of one kind of flower, I needed to pick up a bouquet and bring it to my face. I stood in a sea of blooms on the day of our visit, including bestsellers such as the moth orchids, purple lilacs, hydrangeas, roses, regular and fancy parrot tulips, blue thistle, the newly popular miniature calla lilies, old favorites such as the Stargazer lily, and its new incarnation, the Starfighter. Vendors talked with potential customers, pointing out the just-arrived-and-displayed blooms, breaking into smiles as they picked up a single bloom or arrangement to show it off and close a sale. Other small-business owners and their assistants chattered away incessantly on their cell phones, making sure that purchased flowers were delivered on time to customers in Los Angeles, or farther away, in Orange or San Diego Counties.
Although the shop owners change frequently, and many now sell vases and pots in addition to cut flowers and live plants, the old-timers have worked in the flower market for ten or twenty years. They work and socialize together, many attended local Los Angeles schools together, and they help one another during some workdays lasting up to twelve hours. On certain days the market opens at midnight, the public is allowed in around 8:00 a.m., and by noon everything is over, except for putting delicate blooms, such as the roses, back into their cooler rooms. One worker I spoke to, Garcia, had worked at the market since 1995 and had learned all the flower names and the business from his uncle. He performs the daily routines of unboxing the flower shipments, which arrive twice weekly, recutting the stems, and placing them in buckets of fresh water out on the concrete floor of the vending area. Garcia, like many others, also plucks off the bright orange or rusty-colored anthers of Stargazers and other lilies, thereby emasculating them. Customers complain that their oily pollen stains fancy tablecloths and their clothing. Personally, I’m against floral mutilation, or emasculation, in any form. I want my anthers!
Flowers come to the Los Angeles Flower Market from all over the world. Long-stemmed roses come from Ecuador (the best), but also from Colombia and, recently, from Dutch-funded flower farms in Kenya. Dendrobium orchids make their way from Thailand and Singapore. Blooms exported from growers in Mexico come to the market after their brief inspection stopovers at the Miami or LAX Airports, or from California, such as from the many farms within a hundred-mile radius of this place now growing moth orchids. Mexico is also a major exporter of cut flowers, many of them nontropicals.
Established by Armenian immigrants and still located at its original 754 Wall Street address in downtown Los Angeles, the Original Los Angeles Flower Market and American Florists’ Exchange has been a landmark of this area, and major contributor to its economy, since 1921. More than fifty independent floral vendors pack the crowded fifty-thousand-square-foot warehouses making up this flower market. Not just a haunt of wholesale merchants wanting to buy the freshest and most diverse flowers for their shops, the market is also open daily to the public for retail sales. This is the best place in Los Angeles to get bargains on flowers, whether you are a wholesaler or an individual buyer just wanting the freshest blooms for your dining-room table or a loved one.
Marteen, a worker employed by a tropicals shop owner (flowers and leaves arriving twice weekly from Costa Rica and Hawaii), mentioned the seasonal trends, of anthuriums, gingers, and heliconias used in Southern California luaus, or the heart-shaped spathes of brilliant red anthuriums on Valentine’s Day, or the ever-popular potted moth orchids as Mother’s Day gifts. Here were Hawaiian ti plants (Cordyline fruticosa), philodendrons, and heliconias, along with many orchids. Previously, Marteen had worked in a nearby restaurant, but he joined the market eighteen years ago, never regretting his vocational choice. He winks at me. These days he’s not as excited about the flowers as he once was. He compares working with flowers to wearing the same-color clothes day after day, but then confides that he still enjoys bringing cut flowers home for his wife and family, at least now and then.
We’ve explored how hybrids sometimes happen between plants in nature and, historically, how plant breeders have hybridized flowers producing some of our favorite and showiest garden blooms. Many new breeding efforts are aimed at producing better and new types of bedding plants. These plants (chrysanthemums, marigolds, pansies, petunias) are annuals or tender perennials specifically planted for massed spring and summer colors in the garden. Growing them in colder regions always means they will die with autumn’s first freezing temperatures.
Much of modern plant breeding remains the same as practiced in the early days of plant pioneers such as George Washington Carver (c. 1864–1943) and Luther Burbank. Parental plants are selected for desirable characteristics (colors, disease, or insect resistance; yield and nutrition if they are crop plants) and then hand-crossed to produce new variants among the resulting progeny.
In contrast, when a plant breeder produces a new variety, it takes additional years to build a supply of seeds or plantlets to have enough to send out for about three years of “trialing.” During this period, the trialing company is contracted to grow and evaluate the new plant cultivar under a variety of different climatic conditions. Typically, the plants are grown at five or six geographically and climatically distinct locations, and the plants’ responses to different regimes (e.g., muddy soils, hot summers, early freezes, etc.) are carefully recorded. If a new plant looks promising, the original grower/company will only then begin mass propagation for commercial release and marketing. Three years of trialing can cost $40,000. When the propagation, release, and marketing are added in, the developing company will have spent more than $100,000 getting its new flower to market. Bringing a new annual plant to market is the fastest, at only four or five years. Perennials may take six to ten years, and shrubs, the longest, often more than ten years to enter the marketplace.
Modern plant breeding has gone high-tech with the use of gene guns, irradiation, embryo rescue, and other intricate methods. Commercial plant breeders can use a gene gun to blast DNA into unsuspecting cells in tissue culture. Extracted DNA from a host plant (or animal!) is coated onto microscopic gold particles. These gene-coated particles are shot into egg cells, a few of which absorb and adopt the foreign DNA. This is a rapid way of introducing diverse DNA into target chromosomes within cells. Gene-gun blasting is, however, expensive and tedious, used only by the largest companies, especially for breeding new crop-plant varieties. Gene blasting is much more profitable for developing and selling new agricultural crop plants, with their huge and lucrative markets, than for bedding plants, with much smaller markets and research budgets.
Since the early-twentieth century, “mutation breeding” has routinely used combinations of radiation and/or mutagenic chemicals to generate mutations or “freaks” in older cultivars. Plants are commonly subjected to either X-rays or gamma rays. Techniques to produce these mutagenic plants or seeds were first developed in the 1920s and are still widely used to produce new crop plants (about 75 percent) and ornamental flowering plants (about 25 percent). Chrysanthemums are an example of a flower crop whose breeders have extensively used irradiation for many decades to produce new flowers. Mutagenic plants are less well documented or publicly announced (or leaked) compared to the widespread transgenic processes leading to the creation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) used in our food supply.
Molecular genetics now affords plant breeders unique insights into their breeding programs. Mapping plant genomes, or the use of DNA fingerprinting, has been used to identify genetic materials and kinships among plants. Now, breeders can understand true genetic affinities (relatedness) and not be fooled by flowers that are ecological look-alikes. Thus, modern flower breeders are attempting crosses between species that they would never have tried in the past.
An exciting new technique called embryo rescue is being used to preserve unlikely crosses that would otherwise die in the seed. Plant breeders frequently make crosses that never become mature fruit or contain viable seeds because the recipient/mother plant aborts the offspring. Instead, the usually doomed embryos are surgically removed from the failing seeds and grown on sterile media inside culture flasks. This captures a lot of genetic diversity, and the new progeny live long enough for evaluation as promising new flowers for the garden. Additionally, breeders often engender sterility, creating a floral mule. As the sterile plants can’t make seeds, they are tricked into continuous flowering (called throwing, by the industry) all summer long. With their flowering season now extended unnaturally, nothing could be better for the prospective breeders and buyers. An example of sterility in modern breeding programs is the trailing snapdragon Summer Wave (Torenia), from Proven Winners LLC in Florida.
Beginning in Europe, then spreading to America and around the world, a public largely ignorant of plant-breeding techniques, and declining in overall scientific literacy, has been frightened by otherwise well-meaning environmentalist organizations concerning our food supply. Today, processed-food companies are clamoring to rid their foods, and their labels, of the evils of GMOs, prodded by public debates, street demonstrations, and violent outcries. A current estimate puts the percentage of our processed foods containing one or more GMO ingredients at a staggering 70 to 80 percent, largely due to the American monoculture corn and soybean crops. Thus, there is cause for concern.
As a pollination ecologist and evolutionary biologist, I don’t favor moving genes between largely unrelated organisms, for example from one phylum to another (e.g., freeze-resistant fish genes into Flavr Savr tomatoes, or bacterial plasmid genomes into flowering plants). The latter, however, has happened naturally many times during the evolutionary history of the angiosperms since their origin 130 million years ago. There is something undesirable about playing God with natural selection, or playing Dr. Victor Frankenstein, modeled after Mary Shelley’s fictional character, with our food-producing organisms. This is especially true if they can escape from cultivation or domestication (very likely) and release their aberrant genomes upon the natural world. That is my biggest fear. Mandated isolation distances between evaluation test plots of crop-plant varieties are typically much less than honey bees and other pollinators normally fly, setting a dangerous precedent. Several genes from GMO crops have already found their way into their closest weedy crop-plant relatives (as in some wild radishes and sunflowers).
It is uncertain whether GMO crops produce inherently unsafe “Frankenfoods” for humans, our livestock, other food animals, or our pets. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough. Ironically, the current abject horror that many people feel toward the use of new methods (GMOs and gene guns), and not-so-new (e.g., hybrid flower crosses, mutational breeding) historical techniques to alter plant genomes, is much the same as previous religious opposition and utter disgust about creating and using man-made hybridized garden flowers once expressed to Luther Burbank by his minister.
“Black” flowers are mysterious, foreboding, but also somehow elegant. They seem to spring from another time, or a dreamlike fairy-tale world. According to florist-company marketing mavens, black flowers are supposed to symbolize power, elegance, mystery, and farewell. The romantic message of a black flower is dour, perhaps used hastily or cruelly by someone breaking off a relationship. The floral marketers and public relations experts, however, seem to think a single black blossom, along with a tasteful gift, is a powerful romantic gesture with just a hint of mystery. Does the person still love me? In Victorian and Edwardian times in England, black flowers were eagerly sought out or created artificially using black velvet, lace, or crepe paper.
Examples of nearly black blooms are restricted in nature to the bat flower (Tacca) and some of the Mediterranean and near-Asian irises. During the twentieth century, hybridizers gave us a black dahlia, the dark calla lily, Queen of the Night tulip, Black Magic hollyhock (Alcea), and most recently the Black Velvet petunia. The Bowles’ Black pansy is derived from a combination of much older hybrids between the alpine viola (Viola cornuta) and the heartsease (Viola tricolor). Both of these wild pansies produce melanistic forms in which two petals are so intensely purple that they appear black, with three additional petals with sooty tips. Plant breeders exploited and exaggerated this color form until the flower was all-black with a yellow center.
I spoke with ornamental-flower breeder Jianping Ren about how she created Black Velvet, the world’s first black petunia, in 2006, for Ball Horticulture Company and Ball Colegrave, the UK horticultural giant. This flower came into existence using traditional hybridizing methods, crosses and genetic recombination, not sleight-of-hand genetic alchemy, or inserting genes from a totally unrelated organism. In 2003, Jianping noticed an unusual green petunia among one of her breeding plants, apparently a natural mutant. Green had never revealed itself among the ranks of commercial petunias. She decided to play with the greenish flowers a bit to see what additional or unusual colors might arise.
Jianping used the green mutant to produce generations of petunias with “dirty colors,” not the expected bright and saturated floral hues. Soon, she had something unusual, a luscious velvety-black flower, a first in petunia breeding. Including the traditional crossbreeding, and two years of trialing at different locales and under different growing conditions, it took Jianping and her colleagues four years to develop their black petunia for commercial release to growers in 2010. It has been available for consumers since 2011. Black Velvet has had excellent sales and gardener approval in both the United Kingdom and the United States. With the first release of plants in Britain, during 2011, individual plants were selling for the handsome price of three pounds sterling. The marketing tagline for the new petunias was “Black goes with anything!” How can anyone argue with basic black and haute couture fashion? The little black flower meets the little black dress. I’m thinking that black-clad Goth gardeners are already familiar with this annual bedding plant. Jianping, however, does not expect this “niche flower” to ever replace the popular white, pink, red, and blue hues of the always top-selling garden-shop petunias.
No wildflowers are truly black. They are all a bit of an optical illusion. Floral petals have no inklike black pigments. There are only “optic black” flowers, including the Bowles’ Black pansy and the Black Velvet petunia and similar cultivars. We see these flowers as black because they have a double petal skin with purple pigments in the uppermost layer and blue pigments in the one below. When sunlight interacts with these layers, our eyes and brains are fooled into thinking they are black, the very absence of color. It’s just another trick played on us by sunlight interacting with objects.
Natural selection has produced wildflowers with nearly black floral parts or pollen, typically with darkened floral centers or petals displaying a black web or a starlike pattern. The most spectacular of these are the so-called black irises, found from Israel north into Turkey and Central Asia. Other wildflowers with dark bull’s-eye patterns, or black somewhere, include opium poppies, orange buttercups, red anemones, and the red Adonis flowers of the Middle East. In South Africa, flowers with dark, almost black, spots are found in the iris, daisy, hyacinth, and amaryllis families. The dark blotches, most often advertised discreetly at the petal bases, are contrasting color signals especially attractive to certain pollinating insects. When broken by two white dots, the dark patches are called beetle marks. In southern Africa, specialized scarabs called monkey beetles use the beetle marks to find their way to iris and amaryllis blooms. For the black irises, the jet-colored blotches are believed to mimic sleeping holes used by male bees as dormitories that they vacate the following morning.
Vibrant blue roses have been portrayed in world literature since at least the twelfth century. These fanciful flowers are symbols of unrequited love, or a quest for the impossible to those who seek it. The blue rose is only for those willing to risk everything in the endeavor. The book Kitab al-Felahah, written in Arabic, has tantalizing references to azure roses found only in the Orient, but alas they were clever fakes. Astute growers or merchants inserted a blue dye between the bark and the roots of otherwise normal white or cream-colored roses. After a few weeks they had their blue roses, and presumably duped buyers willing to pay premium prices.
In reality, blue roses simply do not exist as wildflowers. They are more unicorn than flower, a mythic garden vision. Plants in the genus Rosa are genetically handicapped. None of the one hundred or more kinds of wild roses has the right genes to produce the blue pigments. In fact, blue flowers are not all that common in nature, and most won’t adapt to garden life. For blue hues, we should be grateful to the delphiniums, forget-me-nots, geraniums, bellflowers (Campanula), and morning glories (Convolvulus) willing to bloom in our yards.
You can, however, buy blue roses, of a sort, in almost any market or florist shop. What’s going on here? Turns out that it’s easy to dye floral petals blue or other colors. You can do it yourself at home by dissolving water-soluble dyes (e.g., food coloring) in a bucket of water and letting the cut flowers do the rest by drawing up those pigments through water-conducting tissues in their severed stems. Voilà! We now have blue roses, or blue or green or pink carnations. Even worse, many flower vendors spray paint their flowers to create the various colors, including blue ones. Glitterati blooms—ones artificially enhanced with glue, glitter, and faked colors—are here, apparently to stay. Online, there are YouTube flower-painting tutorials, and special aerosol paints are sold in craft stores to help enterprising plant artists get what evolution denies. Sorry, but I draw the line here at this blatant artificiality on the stem. I may, however, be in the flower-buying minority, because these fake creations are popular, selling in huge numbers and in many countries.
Suntory Holdings Ltd. is a global behemoth in the alcoholic-beverage and food industry, seemingly driven by its motto Yatte minahare (“Go for it!” in Japanese). Adding to its portfolio of more than two hundred subsidiary companies, Suntory’s chairman of the board, Nobutada Saji, made a strategic purchase of Florigene, an Australian biotechnology company in 2003. Among plant breeders, it was rumored that the multimillion-dollar deal might have a hidden agenda. Billionaire Saji is an ardent flower lover and dearly wanted the GMO blue rose that Florigene had been secretly developing since the 1990s. Florigene was rumored to have spent A$45 million developing the flower. If so, Saji would have prominently displayed the world’s first man-made blue roses in Suntory’s corporate offices in Osaka, Japan. We can only imagine the lavish reception party that would have accompanied their glorious corporate debut. After various twists and turns, the new acquisition morphed into Suntory Flowers Ltd.
In the Florigene laboratories, molecular engineers used genetic engineering to rearrange the genetic blueprint for rose-petal pigments. The complex research took thirteen years. They began with a white rose and needed three more steps in an elaborate process. First, the researchers borrowed the delphinidin gene from a pansy and put it into an heirloom purplish rose, Cardinal de Richelieu. The now genetically enhanced rosebush produced a rose the rich color of burgundy wine. A molecular technique called RNA interference was then used to hold back the rest of the color production by blocking a specific protein. This procedure allowed only the new blue color to show through within the petals. The first announcement of the blue rose, called Applause, was made in 2004.
Unfortunately their RNA gambit didn’t go entirely as planned. Some of the original reddish rose color remained in the petals. Rose petal cells are more acidic than pansy petal cells, and acid turns blue pigments red (think of litmus-test papers). The much-anticipated blue rose from Suntory is more of a lavender or pale mauve than a true sky blue, at least to my eye. Released into Asian and European markets, Applause roses sold for staggering prices, up to $35 per stem in Japan during 2010. Messing with preexisting genes to add novel colors to flowers isn’t as easy or straightforward as floriculture scientists had once hoped. Only with traditional plant breeding or more insightful genetic engineering to make the rose petals less acidic might the gene shufflers at last have their true blue commercial rose. Whether the flower-buying public will steer clear of GMO flowers has yet to be determined. Perhaps Suntory’s blue rose will become the poster child for genetically engineered blossoms.
We have been modifying the way flowers look and last for centuries, even though some techniques for increasing mutation frequencies are relatively new. A question we often fail to ask, though, is how good (i.e., nutritionally rewarding) are these new flowers for bees, butterflies, sphinx moths, and hummingbirds?
A nationwide citizen science project was conducted in England to determine which garden flowers were most visited by bumble bees. Under the direction of M. Fussell and Sally Corbet, schoolchildren observed more than thirty thousand bees on common garden-flower varieties in the United Kingdom. In this clever project, bumble bees were “asked” to choose among wild types and modified garden cultivars. Coming out as a clear favorite was the little shrub rockspray (Cotoneaster horizontalis). Branches on this bush were alive with buzzing bees that could be heard from some distance away. Other bumble bee favorites included red clovers (Trifolium pratense), an excellent source of nectar for long-tongued bees. These same bees often avoided flowers that upon closer examination lacked rewards. For example, they avoided a pretty doubled variety of trefoil (Lotus corniculatus), whose yellow blooms no longer secreted nectar. “Doubled” flowers often lack nectar as the production of extra petals stops development of nectar glands. Doubling also reduces the number of pollen-making stamens. Thus, the “bee bread” in such flowers is reduced or more difficult for bees to collect.
You can’t tell at first glance whether the flowers bought at your neighborhood nursery will attract and reward pollinating animals. Floral scents are routinely diminished or altogether absent in many popular floral varieties. Scent is often the first thing lost when breeders create longer-lasting cut flowers. Fragrance molecules are metabolically expensive to produce. A flower with no or limited scent lasts longer on the plant or in a vase.
If you want your garden beds to attract the winged jewels we call hummingbirds, butterflies, and other insects, you need to choose appropriate seeds and seedlings. You can search online (e.g., the Pollinator Partnership or the Xerces Society) or at local native plant nurseries for the very best, pollinator rewarding, flowering plants that can be easily grown in your region. Many of the best plants to use are locally adapted native wildflowers.
A botanical flower spectacle beyond all others takes place in London every spring. It’s difficult to call it a flower show or utter its name in the same breath with any major flower exhibition anywhere. Simply called the Chelsea, its fame spread long ago around the globe and is rekindled each year when attendees scramble to buy tickets. Gardeners and florists daydream about it in the days prior to the show’s opening. They fantasize about walking amid the extravagant displays of fragrant, colorful blooms, foliage, and more.
An entire book could be devoted to the pageantry, traditions, history, and spectacle that are the Chelsea. These aren’t just potted plants on parade, ones with blue ribbons that you can find almost anywhere else. The show is pure spectacle and surrealistic eye candy. Assembled here are world-class specimen plants and floral displays with more than a bit of behind-the-scenes trickery. Some of the plants have been forced into flowering early for the show via temperature control, proper lighting, and timing—watered with plenty of money. The hundreds of exhibitors are more dream merchants than vendors. I can’t think of another national or international flower show where the competition is so keen, and where awards are given for imaginary landscapes, botanical dreamscapes of every description. The Chelsea is all about grand illusion. Even human royalty arrive to delight in the extravagances of their flowers.
The Chelsea began in 1862 as the Great Spring Show, held by the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) at its garden in Kensington, which today is an affluent and densely populated district of west London. In 1888, the RHS moved the Chelsea show to the heart of London at the Temple Gardens, whose recorded history dates to 1307, the time of the Knights Templar. The roses for which the Temple Gardens have always been famous are mentioned in Shakespeare’s Henry VI: Part I. The Chelsea Flower Show is arguably the largest and most important flower show in the world. All the major plant-breeding companies are represented, displaying their latest creations. Here, the world’s rarest and most expensive flowers are first introduced to the public.
The show is held for five days in May. Since 1905, it has been held on the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London. Today, the show is attended by more than 160,000 visitors, only limited by its relatively small, eleven-acre exhibition site. The show is covered intensely on television by the British Broadcasting Corporation, and at least a few members of the British royal family routinely attend its gala preview and open the gala event. New flowering-plant varieties are showcased and launched. The show is very much like a haute couture, Parisian spring fashion show premiering the latest clothing from famous designers. Here, ruffled blooms are the showstoppers, instead of starved, leggy female models in exclusive designer gowns.
Historically, important and startlingly beautiful flowers have been introduced at the Chelsea Flower Show. I’m thinking of the 2006 introduction of the amazing camellia-like Juliet rose by legendary UK plant breeder David Austin, which took the horticultural world by storm. This abundantly petaled, pale rose was fifteen years in the making at an estimated cost of $4.72 million.
The Chelsea dream-makers are at work every year trying to best one another for bragging rights and awards, and to best their previous already-extravagant displays. It’s always a surprise and a delight to experience what they create. Illusions and dreamy imaginary landscapes are created from scratch, botanical worlds and floralscapes that you will never experience anywhere else. A prime example was the ostentatious and lavish “Ace of Diamonds” garden-landscape exhibit created (by David Domoney) for the 2010 Chelsea show, more costly than all the other Chelsea exhibits combined during its more than hundred-year history. It not only featured plants named after jewelry, but rare jewelry inspired by plants. Included within this fanciful environment was a daisy-shaped custom ring created for the show, set with a rare $5 million blue diamond, along with other smaller diamonds loaned by a Bond Street financier. Nearby, several large security men stood watching the crowds, giving this pricey garden the feel of a nightclub doorway on Ipswich High Street in the preclosing, early-morning hours. The garden filled six thousand square feet and was valued at more than $31 million. Plenty of green spent on flowers and their elegant bejeweled temporary home.