Your lovely Valentine roses are likely chemical bombs

by JEFF LOWENFELS

GARDENING at the Anchorage Daily News

(02/14/08 02:45:38)

It's Valentine's Day, a Hallmark card holiday if ever there was one (and I don't mean that in a good way). Imagine, someone thinks we have to have a holiday to tell those closest to us that we love them! It's ridiculous.

Nonetheless, Madison Avenue and the florist industry have glommed onto the idea like a bacteria sticking to soil, so every year we face the pressure to buy a card, attach it to a box of chocolates and give both, along with a dozen roses, to our beloveds.

Now, some of you reading this early in the day are no doubt thinking, "Oh-oh, I forgot! Thanks, Jeff," and you will call a florist or stop by the floral department of a supermarket and buy your Valentine some roses.

Others are cursing me for bringing up the subject, and still others are smirking behind the paper at the breakfast table knowing that they did remember to buy those flowers and have them delivered to their Valentine's office.

OK, here is where this garden columnist will get in trouble. Actually, it has been a long time since I wrote anything controversial in this column. Oh sure, I know that when I started writing about the science behind gardening and characterized most garden books as rank "mythology," several of my garden writer friends were insulted.

The point of the matter is that those flowers you bought or are contemplating buying were probably not grown organically. That's because there are not enough U.S. growers of flowers to supply them, and millions of flowers are shipped in from South America, Taiwan, Israel and other countries. Since the United States doesn't want to important any hitchhiking bugs, worms, fungi or bacteria that might take hold here, these flowers are doused with chemicals so they won't be rejected at the border. And as such, they are full of pesticides that no one would ever want to get near.

One popular report indicates that imported flowers contain up to 1,000 times more carcinogenic chemicals than there is in the food we are allowed to eat.

No one is going to eat those roses or carnations or orchids you bought, and, while I don't believe it for a minute, there are many reports that these flowers don't pose a threat to your love. However, they do pose a huge problem to those who grow them and the florists who handle them.

Frankly, who wants to receive a gift grown on the back of someone else's health? The foreign workers who grow these flowers are themselves doused with chemicals, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and fumigants that you and I wouldn't use and that have often been banned from use by commercial greenhouse growers in the United States.

Again, you may not be harmed by getting some of the 100 million roses that will become Valentine's Day gifts today, but what happens to them when you are done? They die, and you toss them out, either into your compost pile or the garbage. Sooner or later, some of the bad stuff in them gets into our water table. Ah, but thinking this way is selfish. It is the workers who grow them and their water tables that we should be thinking about.

The Romantic poet Robert Burns wrote, "O my love is like a red, red rose," and he may have been correct. But my love isn't! That was back before the age of chemicals. I would never compare my wife to a red rose -- unless I knew it was an organic rose.

So, if you haven't purchased those roses, carnations, orchids or other flowers yet, think twice. Look for organic or skip it. The chocolate is probably much healthier for all involved -- again, as long as the beans were organically grown.

Don't let Valentine's Day continue to toxify the earth.