I’VE BEEN DIGGING into a diverse and compelling collection of essays in a recent book that’s centered on the subject of flowers—everything from topics like their breeding, to which species we covet most of all, to some of the downsides of the massive floral industry, including ubiquitous plastics used in propagation and flower arranging, or how the branding of plants has limited the palette.

The author, Christin Geall, calls the book “Flora Culture: How Flowers Shape Our World” an abecedarium (yes that’s a word), since the entries are arranged alphabetically. She also calls it a manifesto. She’s made time recently to tell us some of the tales within in.

Christin Geall’s work focuses on the intersections of nature, culture, and horticulture, and her latest book,  “Flora Culture: How Flowers Shape Our World” (affiliate link) is no exception. (Above, a photo she took of a collection of cultivars of tulips and more fro  her

Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the page for a chance to win a copy of “Flora Culture.”

Read along as you listen to the June 15, 2026 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

‘flora culture,’ with christin geall

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Margaret Roach: It’s a very unusual book, and as I said, it’s an abecedarium [laughter], which I don’t know why it just cracks me up, that word. I’ve never seen it in print before and I love that, which means that it’s arranged in alphabetical order. The entries, each of the essays, starts with a word, a title, that corresponds to the letter of the alphabet, and they’re in order.

Christin Geall: Eighty-five of them.

Margaret: [Laughter.] Yes. More than the letters in the alphabet.

Christin: Yes.

Margaret: Yes. So to start, really, maybe some backstory, because this is not exactly a book about cut flowers. As I say that, I sort of realize it actually recalls a funny exchange that you note in the book that you had with your publisher. So tell us about that, and tell us what the book is about: its intention.

Christin: Well, I did submit the manuscript and the publisher at Rizzoli said, “Wait a minute, I thought this book was about floral design.” And one of the critiques was there were too many people in the book. The argument there is that people in gardening books date the book, in terms of the clothing they’re wearing and so on.

And I thought to myself, well, wait a minute: Cultivars date books. You and I have definitely seen fashions come and go in terms of plants and garden styles. So that was an element that I was playing with throughout the book, which was fashion. And I wanted the book to be really visually compelling. So there are over 250 images, and it’s very colorful, in order to add some levity to actually some very serious topics. [Laughter.]

Margaret: Yes. And a lot of those, some of the more serious ones, touch on the kind of massive industry behind our cut flowers and also our garden plants—how its evolution has changed, as I said in the introduction, the plant palette, and more impacts that it’s had. Before we get to that, you mentioned in the book that some flowers have had enduring affection from humans, like tulips and roses, I think, are sort of on top of the hit parade. They’ve had enduring affection. Is that correct? [Below, rose image by Libby Ellis.]

Christin: They have. Yes, that’s right, in part because of how they have featured in Western art. And looking at art history and horticultural history, there’s often some interesting overlaps. Of course, we all know about Tulipomania in the 17th century in Holland. But those flowers appear again and again, in part because we have seen them made beautiful as opposed to some other plants.

Margaret: Right. But then to get back to the industry thing, using tulips, for instance, as an example: To grow a cut tulip, and actually for most people to grow the tulips that they grow for bedding out—to use an old-fashioned term, actually, bedding out—to use them for spring color in their gardens, a lot of times they toss them after one use. So it fuels an industry.

Christin: Yeah. It’s not really a sustainable industry, the tulip industry. It takes a grower two to three years to get a saleable bulb. And with some of the modern cultivars, they’re really meant to just be a one-and-done plant. And it’s more economically viable for a grower to actually toss them on the compost heap than to lose the space in their plot to try and see if they’ll rebloom, because they likely won’t. So there are ways around that for home gardeners: looking to species tulips, or even some of the Darwin hybrids are better. But also climate has something to do with it as well. But now tulips are almost like disposable flowers.

Margaret: And that’s what I was getting at. That’s what you get at in the book, that the goal has not been to make them perennialize or anything like that.

Christin: No.

Margaret: There’s a formula that makes it work for the industry, and it’s become a commodity item that we buy both for cut flowers in the florist shop or whatever, and as gardeners year after year after year, yes?

Christin: Yes, yes. And there has been some movement to support local growers and make the tulip the new rose for Valentine’s Day by forcing tulips in heated greenhouses. They’re sometimes grown in plastic crates and warmed up to get them to market. And I think this was in part one of the reasons that I wrote the book, is that everyone has been asking, well, what is the sustainable flower? What can we do? And it was worth leaning into some of these topics to find out really is supplying tulips in February a good idea in some climates? Yeah. [Above, the flower bulbs market in Utrecht, the Netherlands.]

Margaret: Under S in the book, you have an entry entitled Seasonality, and you underscore that despite expressions like “to everything there is a season” [laughter], just what you just spoke about with tulips in February, the floral industry in particular is “contraseasonal,” is the word you use. Lots of “untimely things” you say.

Christin: Lots of untimely things, yes. And I learned that some florists aren’t actually trained in true seasonality. They might be trained in what is the season at the flower market. So Protea will show up in the New York flower market in September, let’s say. So that might be Protea season for a floral designer or Japanese sweet pea season or certain Ranunculus are now almost all the time. But certain flowers, it’s when they come to market. And that’s one of the impacts of globalization, is that people don’t really have a sense of true seasonality. [Above, Protea barbigera courtesy of Kent Flowers.]

Margaret: Yes. I mean, I knew that, but I hadn’t really thought of it that way [laughter].

Christin: A lot of this we think about in terms of food. I think that many of us have … So much work has gone into food and sustainable food production and local food production, but not as much attention has come into, I’d say, horticulture and floriculture.

Margaret: Right.

Christin: Yeah. So that was my goal. Yeah.

Margaret: So I wanted to talk about under B for Breeding [laughter]–

Christin: Yes.

Margaret: So I have to say just as a preface to talking about plant breeding and so forth, I have to say—and this is not just about cut flowers, but garden plants as well, “annuals,” or for that matter perennials, etc.—I have to say I get kind of depressed at the garden center these days. I was spoiled back in the day years ago when there were lots more sort of specialty retail nurseries run by real plant nuts, and they each had a particular passion, and you’d go to so-and-so because he was really into this or that. And so the other person, she was into the … And it was a different type of shopping.

And now there’s sort of, no matter where you go, there’s like row after row, tray after tray, rack after rack of branded stuff, often the same at every place.

And then in a few years, I know that if I do find one—like if I find a Heuchera that I really like—three or five years from now, it probably won’t be featured any more in the assortment [laughter].

Christin: That is absolutely true. I know the feeling. Yes. Yeah, I know the feeling. And I have epigraphs for every essay in the book, so I had to find 85 epigraphs. So this was fun. But one of them is “fashion is the leading edge of planned obsolescence.” So the fact that you can’t find that Heuchera any more is somewhat intentional, but also some of those cultivars, those Heuchera, some of them don’t actually last anyway, or maybe not long enough.

But yeah, it’s fascinating. The modern garden center, 40 percent of the plants on display might be owned by one corporation—Ball Horticulture would be one of them—that have other businesses under them. Some of these companies are vertically integrated, so they’re supplying seed. They’re also growing the plants, they’re branding the plants, they’re doing the marketing. And really the breeders now are just kind of, to quote this geneticist that I learned from in the book, is that they’re just sort of “spinning the color wheel and sort of doling out new varieties to reliable mainstays.”

So we’ll see different colors of petunias or different colors of geraniums, and down we go. And it’s generally the same genera that are presented, just in slightly different forms and colors.

Margaret: Yes, it’s interesting. Again, I had more fun when in the early days of my garden career, what it was other like-minded nuts like myself who obsessed over things and wanted to find the wackiest one or the most unusual one. It wasn’t mass produced, but-

Christin: There still are some nurseries like that, though. Or clubs, right, where people can trade.

Margaret: Absolutely. But even within two hours of where I live, there were a half a dozen that no longer exist that were well known. Do you know what I mean?

Christin: I think it’s hard to make a living at it. Yeah.

Margaret: Absolutely. Absolutely. So it’s a big business in a different way. And the breeding, and you just talked about the breeders: So the person who actually invents that Heuchera or whatever—who breeds it, who discovers it—might be getting a commission, but isn’t producing it.

Christin: Right. They would license it or sell the rights to a company like Proven Winners.

Margaret: Right. So it’s just a whole different model.

Christin: It is. Yeah. Yeah. [Laughter.]

Margaret: Yeah. And I think as you point out in the book, I think under C for Cultivar [laughter], it’s had an impact. The same thinking has an impact on food crops, too. I think you say that it’s estimated that about 75 percent of food crop varieties have been lost in the last century because there is this desire … Can you patent a seed variety? I don’t think you can, can you?

Christin: No, you can. You can.

Margaret: Oh, O.K.

Christin: You can. So that’s often the situation with the exploitation of genetic resources from the Global South.

I think we should step back to maybe one of the reasons why I wrote this book. I wrote a book prior called “Cultivated: The Elements of Floral Style” [affiliate link]. A lot of European art history, color theory in that book. And I realized, oh, I sort of left out the impact of horticulture or design sensibilities on the developing world or the Global South. And so in this book, I really wanted to bring some attention to that, because I’d also seen in this “grown, not flown” movement, a real denial of some of the benefits of using some tropical flowers as well. Sorry, I just jumped topics there, but yes [laughter].

Margaret: Yeah. And with the seeds, I think I sort of said of the ones that have dropped out of use, the food-crop varieties have been lost in the last century, they’re probably open-pollinated-

Christin: Yes.

Margaret: …which is why they’re not patented. Yeah, they’re open-pollinated varieties probably.

Christin: Yeah. It’s probably about losing these landraces that have been created over millennia that are adapted to certain environments.

Margaret: Yes. So I misspoke [laughter], but the intention was to say that as opposed to-

Christin: Yeah.

Margaret: So it’s had widespread impact in not just floriculture and in bedding plants and so forth, but elsewhere.

Christin: Yeah. I think many of us feel like the diversity is somewhat gone from the garden center now, and that’s another reason as well. Fewer people are growing from seed or necessarily saving seed or trading seed than 100 years ago.

Margaret: And then there’s these other costs or issues, and I hinted at them in the introduction. I found it fascinating you delved into microplastics, and the words like biodegradable and bioplastics, but we don’t even really understand what those mean, I don’t think, in a lot of cases.

The industry, both floriculture, the cut-flower industry, and the garden industry use a lot of plastics of various kinds. And I mean you cited one statistic, I think you quoted “The Financial Times” that calculated that approximately 15,000 metric tons of floral foam, which is equivalent, you said, to 2.5 billion plastic bags, is sent to the landfill annually by flower lovers. So just floral foam alone, I mean, forget all the other stuff [laughter].

Christin: Oh, and floral foam is sort of even a darker substance because it actually does crumble and does turn into very, very tiny, tiny pieces.

So microplastics: There is room for hope. The Royal Horticultural Society in England has banned it. There isn’t any at the Chelsea Flower Show or any of their shows. People are finding other ways to support flowers. There’s a movement also in England to work with churches about changing their expectations about how flowers can appear in sacred spaces. Because often it’s a venue that will have a regulation about spilled water or whatever and people know that Oasis floral foam—sorry to say the big, bad name—is one way that a venue won’t have their floors damaged or whatever. But people are finding different ways now and returning to the pre-plastic period, which wasn’t very long ago. This was really only invented in the 50s, I think it was.

Margaret: And so my grandmother had a collection of flower frogs, metal and glass flower frogs, and I have them and they’re perfectly good and they do the job, so what the heck? And they last forever. Sarah Raven, the British cut-flower expert, I interviewed her for a “New York Times” column not long ago, and she was talking about this issue, and then she makes these little grids out of twigs tied with a special kind of almost a little bit stretchy twine at the joints. It just looks like a grid, like a tic-tac-toe board. And they sit on top of different-sized vessels, a bowl or a vase or whatever, and they serve as the frog, and they’re reusable again so many times. There’s other ways to do it, right?

Christin: There are other ways to do it. The floral community really put a lot of energy into rethinking flower foam, and I fully support that. And I speak to the Garden Club of America groups often, and I think that would be a group that could move to a no flower foam, and that would have a huge impact actually. So it’s just a little behind here, I would say, compared to England.

Margaret: Yeah. And then I think you also noted that 10 or 15 years ago the talk became, “Oh, we’ll have biodegradable plastic things,” but what does “biodegradable” mean?

Christin: Well, that’s really hazy. And-

Margaret: Apparently, I didn’t know how hazy it was till I read it in your book [laughter].

Christin: It’s quite hazy. There’s a sustainable floristry movement out of Australia that really has done the work on this. And some of these bioplastics do need… they need to be incinerated at high temperatures. Well, those kind of facilities don’t really exist for everyone. When it says it’s biodegradable, how is it biodegradable? Does that mean I can put up my compost heap? No, it means it might need some special treatment to actually biodegrade. So we’ll see.

Margaret: And I think you said, is it going to take 10,000 years? Yeah, maybe in 10,000 years it’s biodegradable or whatever. Well, that’s not exactly what people think it means. It’s a little greenwash-y, isn’t it?

Christin: It is quite greenwash-y. Yeah. And that was one of the driving things behind writing the book, is that there were all these conversations going on and I didn’t feel that these words, many of them were quite slippery—footprint, sustainable and so on—needed some definition or context, so that everyone could be speaking of similar language so we could move forward on some of these things.

Margaret: Yes. And just so that people are listening, they don’t think, “Oh, these two women, they really hate plants” [laughter] or “They’re really anti-gardens.” But quite to the contrary, we’re both quite passionate about it and that’s not the point here at all.

Christin: No, the book, I think it’s quite joyful, because there’s a lot of hope in it, and there are also interludes about art or design or modernism or orchids or other things as well. We’re picking some sort of the hot topics right now, and we haven’t actually even gotten to aesthetics yet, But any conversation about art or plant or about horticulture for me is also about art in some way, not just ecology.

Margaret: I just wanted to say there was lots of oddball and fun stuff, and stuff about beauty, and just like you just said about aesthetics and so forth. And then there were just funny things. There was one, under C for Chromophobia, the fear of color, and the idea that vivid colors were considered at some points in time savage. I thought, yeah, great. [Laughter.] That’s kind of fun.

Christin: Yeah, very fun. Very fun. Also tricky, tricky how different colors are ascribed different qualities, and how color is subjective and it’s very cultural. And we sort of forget that as well, but it’s important to be aware. And chromophobia, it’s a term that I picked up from an artist who walked into an art collector’s home with all these white walls, and then began to meditate and wrote a very slim book on this subject, about how color had been maligned or subjected to the foreign or the feminine or the infantile, and that sort of true art was into this line and form. So it’s an opinion piece, but it’s just worth exploring.

Margaret: And there’s lots of—again, there’s just a head-spinning number of possible topics and you can just dip in. You don’t have to read from page 1 to page whatever. You can just dip in and just have fun and take a little adventure with …

Christin: Take a little adventure. Yes, I took about half of the pictures myself and had a wonderful time traveling for some of them, particularly to South Africa and some other places that related to my understanding of plants and how they’re grown and how flowers are grown. But then I tried to source images from museums, galleries, artists, other photographers to not do a sort of biobook, like a book about me [laughter].

Margaret: Yes.

Christin: Yeah. I wanted to open the conversation and include other people in it and it was a privilege to have that. But if I could highlight designers, other designers or other artists, that was important to me. And I was grateful that Rizzoli gave me a very good photo budget to go shopping with.

Margaret: Yeah, and it’s beautiful. It’s luscious. I mean-

Christin: Opulent.

Margaret: It’s definitely opulent and not savage. [Laughter.]

Christin: No, no, no. [Laughter.]

Margaret: Not so vivid that it’s savage. I’m teasing you. But anyway, yeah, it’s beautiful. I’m so glad to speak to you and I’m sure we’re going to have to speak again because there’s how many more? There’s about 82 or 83 more that we haven’t spoken about, essays in the book. So it’s been fun.

enter to win a copy of ‘flora culture’

I’LL BUY A COPY of “<https://amzn.to/4f3NgWh”> “Flora Culture: How Flowers Shape Our World,”” by Christin Geall for one lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is answer this question in the comments box below:

Roses and tulips may be enduring cultural and industry favorites, but what’s your favorite flower(s) and why?

No answer, or feeling shy? Just say something like “count me in” and I will, but a reply is even better. I’ll pick a random winner after entries close at midnight Tuesday, June 23, 2026. Good luck to all.

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prefer the podcast version of the show?

MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 17th year in March 2026. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the June 15, 2026 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).