The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  England’s Flowers

  MAY 1998

  For a long time England used to go to bed early. It was a country then of chimneys and cocoa-drinkers. Rich Tea was the favourite dip. In the evening, people would listen to well-spoken liars on the radio; they would polish their own shoes, and go up the stairs early. There were flowers on the wallpaper, flowers on the carpet. There were flowers on the china and on the lamp shades. The bedspread was usually an acre of roses, their redness quite faded in the wash.

  The people of that country breathed flowers in their sleep. And, sometimes, their dreams – much like the old ballads – were pastoral dramas shaded in green. The flowerbed of England was love-bower and grave. The typical house in the typical street: a mouth of flowers, an English garden. How small the world is in the English memory: everywhere an outpost, a colony, a dominion; and in every field there was a flower-decked corner of home, where a soldier’s bones made it forever England. Prime ministers and poets have made much of England’s flowers. And the people have, too. Flowers put them in mind of who they like to be; the old houses, the old soil.

  But what is the Elizabethan garden now? The empire is gone: there’s more of the world in England now than there is of England in the world. The supermarket is a global bazaar; the television set is a mobile room with a view. England could never be that old thing again. But the love of flowers has grown somehow. It’s as if the people were keen for the scent of that other England, that place of shelter and communal worth, of blooms as symbols of national feeling. It’s as if they yearn, from time to time – usually in times of disaster and dismay – for a childish liberty of flowers, like Wordsworth’s sacred nurseries of blooming youth:

  In whose collegiate shelter England’s Flowers

  Expand, enjoying through their vernal hours

  The air of liberty, the light of truth.

  And maybe there’s a longing for something more: a runaway sense of popular pride, a more fevered application of Wordsworth’s floriation, such as that of Alfred Austin, with his ‘Who Would Not Die For England!’

  So across the far-off foam,

  Bring him hither, bring him home,

  Over avenues of wave,

  English ground, – to English grave;

  Where his soldier dust may rest,

  England’s flag above his breast,

  And, love-planted, long may bloom

  English flowers about his tomb.

  England’s flowers. What a commodity. Wrapped in plastic at the palace gates. Yet most of those flowers were not English. Most flowers sold in England now are not from this place. They are products of other debatable lands and they have their own stories.

  This is the story of one bunch. Their existence began in 1970. They are a breed of the most popular white lily, Lilium longiflorum. With lilies, the shortest route from breeding to market is eight years. In 1978 the first of our breed of lilies was produced by Herut Yahel of the Israeli agricultural research group. Nowadays, Israel produces ten to fifteen million of these bulbs every year.

  Dudu Efron is a bulb manufacturer. He stood talking under an orange tree, a half-year after Diana’s death. It was a normal March day in the Israeli desert and Efron stood fanning himself with a mobile phone. ‘The Arabs hate everything we produce,’ he said, ‘but sometimes business is stronger than politics.’ He was talking about the fact that many Israeli flowers end up in the Persian Gulf. They go to Holland first. ‘The flowers, they lose their identity at the market. And, if the price is right, the Arabs will buy them.’ He laughed under his moustache. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there is a little something of Israeli soil in the houses of our friends, the Arabs.’

  Efron was born in Jerusalem and grew up on a kibbutz. Agriculture and politics were mixed up in the life he remembers. ‘The farmers in the kibbutzim were heroes. They protected the borders. The Israeli people thought they were noble. Now people think farmers are dirty. Stupid.’ For twenty years Efron was a wheat grower, then he planted potatoes, and for the past few years he has been producing bulbs. Especially lily bulbs. Three years ago he produced the bulbs for our bunch. He froze them, then sold them to Haviv Sela.

  Sela’s farm is a baked cluster of sheds. There is also a house; a heap of sandshoes in the yard; a broken pot on the window; a goldfinch outspoken on the clothes line. The palm trees have hot leaves; a patch of sand encircles the bottom of each tree. Thirty years ago all of this was desert. Now, they grow white lilies from the soil. The farm is just outside the village of Amioz. ‘We are making our history by single years, not centuries,’ said Sela, out in the field with his blue cap. He rolled three bulbs in a brown hand. They can be used three, maybe four times, he said. Every June, he will pluck all the bulbs out of the fields, scrub them clean, leave them to dry for a while, and then place them in a giant freezer for sixty days. ‘This makes the bulb think it has been through winter.’ Once this is done, he will start planting them again. Each bulb to be planted four inches down in the soil. Sela’s soil – the soil he calls ‘my land’ – is a difficult shade of red.

  The bulbs for our bunch were put into the soil on 9 December 1997. This was the bulbs’ third time pregnant: they produced two sets of flowers last year, and had since spent most of October and November in a pretend Siberian winter. Here again in the soil, they began to sprout. They were sprinkled with two minutes of water eight times a day. They had artificial light at night. The light came down in two-minute bursts. As the flowers grew, the men and women on the farm, who are all from Thailand, would weed the field by hand.

  By January, young, green shoots had broken through the soil. Waxy leaves were showing. By February, the flower heads were formed. The cells were turgid with water, bloated with radiant energy. The heads were deep green; they tapered to white at the ends. By March, the stems were twelve inches high. Stout. And two weeks on, they had grown to their height: twenty-two inches. Sun-fed, water-made, chemically charged, carbon dioxide-breathing lilies. White lilies. They swayed easily in Sela’s field. Full of life. The blue sky above, the red earth below.

  Soon, it was time to cut them. Sela took out a small knife. He clipped each of our stems just a half-inch above the dirt. Thousands of stems were harvested this day: Wednesday, 11 March. Each of our stems had several flowers. Long heads, tight shut. They were carried from the field and placed in buckets of water. For five hours they stand outside in the sun. (This is an important time: if they aren’t allowed to take in water and sun for this period of time, and just breathe, the flowers may never open.) Sela harvested our bunch at ten in the morning. They sat out in buckets until three o’clock. The buckets were then put into the big fridge. They are meant to stay there for not less than sixteen hours. Our bunch went in for the cold night. Meantime, Sela’s family came about the yard. A cock crowed. Mrs Sela drank Diet Coke from a big plastic bottle. ‘I don’t like to feed my body rubbish,’ she said. The uncut lilies moved in the long field. Acres of them. The lilies of the field.

  I am the rose of Sharon and

  the lily of the valleys. As a lily among thorns, so

  is my love among the daughters.

  (Song of Solomon 2: 1–2)

  And why take thought for raiment? Consider

  the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil

  not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto

  you, That even Solomon in all his glory was

  not arrayed like one of these.

  (Matthew 6: 28–9)

  Fable says the white lily sprang from the milk of Juno. But Christian fable makes the larger claim upon them: they are everywhere in the Bible. They represent virtue, celestial beauty and purity. To the Greeks and Romans it was a medicinal flower. The bulbs were sometimes crushed and made into ointment. The fragrant petals were used as a balm. In the Middle Ages, the white lily was associated with the Virgin Mary (the flower is included in many paintings of her), and also connected with Saints Dominick and Louis. Naturalists are certain lilies grew plentifully
in the Israel of the Bible. Yet they disappeared somehow. No one reported seeing a colony of lilies in Palestine until 1925. On a fine September morning M. N. Naftolsky, a well-known plant hunter who was that day leading a party of students from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, found a flock of white lilies growing wild in the mountains of Upper Galilee. This, he knew, was the lily of the fields, the lily of the valley, the lily among the thorns. It had found a way to survive the various ravages of the land.

  Sela’s cultivated lilies spent the night at two degrees Celsius. He brought them out of the fridge at 8 a.m. on 12 March. It was an especially warm Thursday. Our lilies looked all lushly green. They smelled of trees and soil. The flowers were still clamped shut.

  Sela’s seven Thai workers were in the packing shed. Chen Singsai is separating the good from the bad. He does this all day. ‘You must be careful not to give too much water,’ he said. ‘Too much water: the leaves go yellow.’ Singsai comes from a village 600 miles from Bangkok. ‘We have to work many more hours for the Mother’s Day.’ He hopes to learn things about farming, things he can take back to his own village one day. He has been in Israel for seven years. His wife, like him, is working at the bench and, just like him, she is sitting on a column of upturned plastic tubs. ‘We have been working the sixteen hours,’ says Mr Singsai. The pay is reasonable. He is able to send something home to his mother. ‘Not bad life,’ he said. All the Thai women who work in these sheds have covered their faces. Even in the heat they are covered. ‘They want to be white,’ says Singsai. ‘Like lilias.’

  Our stems were put on to a machine. It was a kind of sorting machine. At the end, the stems were cut to size by a rotary blade. Many of the leaves were stripped. The man working that end of the machine stood in a pile of mashed plants. A patch of greenery tattooed on to the floor. ‘Many flowers,’ he said, ‘and looking the same.’

  Someone else took each bunch of five stems and placed them in plastic bags. At 9 a.m. our bunch was packed, with some other bunches, into a pink-and-yellow box, a carton with the word Carmel printed on it. At 11 a.m. a truck came to the farm. The cartons were loaded up. A lazy dog lay at the farm’s gate. It was panting. It closed its eyes to the dust clouds. The too-hot morning; the rumble of trucks. The flowers were on their way to the packing house at Mabuim. This place is run by Agrexco – the company behind Carmel – and is one of fifteen packing houses in Israel. Agrexco is the main exporter of Israeli fruit and flowers. Liav Leshem, one of the company’s young product managers, responsible for flowers, was driving on one of the Negev’s new dual carriageways. He had one of those hands-free mobile phones. The phone rang every other minute. He spoke Hebrew to the office; English to customers calling from Holland and Germany. He wore a watch that was lodged in a sweatband. He drove past a spray-painting of Princess Diana. Someone had put a moustache on her. The graffito shimmers in the heat.

  ‘It is hard,’ said Leshem. ‘we are dealing here with a very perishable thing. Flowers die too early if you don’t look after them, give them the right conditions. At every stage of the flowers’ journey, we keep the right temperature. It is very hard. There are three ways in the world to lose money – women, gambling and agriculture. Women is the most enjoyable; gambling is the quickest; and agriculture, well, agriculture is the surest.’

  Agrexco was founded in 1957. Forty years later its turnover was $600 million. Year upon year the company grows: it is one of the biggest suppliers of roses and lilies and gerberas to the English market, and it feeds vegetables into all the main supermarkets. ‘England wants more of the flowers now,’ says Leshem. ‘The supermarkets are taking over. They’ve increased their orders for next year. They like the quality, and we move fast.’

  He was moving fast as he said this. Field after field fell away. ‘Why are the white lilies so expensive?’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you: because you have to freeze the bulbs after each planting. They demand a lot of irrigation in the ground. You cannot pack too many in a box, so the transportation costs are high. Very high. We send them all by air. But people love the lilies. Mysterious … lilies in England. They use them in the marriages and in the deaths, no? England is our biggest market. What is the difference between a wedding and a funeral? In a wedding, two people are buried.’

  The packing house at Mabuim is across from a cluster of new dwellings. They are middle-income houses; nice terracotta roofs. Three hundred growers – one as far as the Gaza Strip, 120 kilometres away – send their produce to this warehouse. More than 250 million flower stems a year pass through here. Millions of white lilies.

  Our bunch arrived at Mabuim at midday on Thursday morning, 12 March. They were left in the fridge there for an hour. Then they were stamped. The label has the grower’s barcode on it, the plant’s name, and the serial number of the country and the customer. The cartons were loaded on to a pallet.

  Our bunch went into a truck – bound for the Agrexco terminus at Ben Gurion Airport – at one o’clock. Each carton was passed through a bomb-detector machine before being loaded. A young Israeli driver stood by the machine. He was trying to blow a smoke ring through a smoke ring.

  There are no accents in Israel. There is no dialect. There are many different kinds of voice, but only one steady inflection. Unlike other small countries – Denmark or Ireland, say – where the accent can change from street to street. ‘The heart of the people is more ready for peace now,’ says Leshem. ‘More time, more blood on the soil, but eventually peace will come.’

  Leshem’s boss is called Gidon Mazor, a handsome, easy-smiling man in a cotton shirt. ‘My father,’ said Mazor, ‘was a vegetable man. My father pushed me towards the flowers. It was a way of keeping me at home. And my own son is now in the business too.’ He speaks as if companies such as Agrexco add to the big idea of Israel. Their idea. They show the country working. Another of Leshem’s young colleagues said it is all just great: ‘Britain, which left our country in such a mess in 1948, is now dying for our flowers. They can’t get enough of them. Our lilies are the best in the world. We breed them to last long, and to stand up.’

  Mazor is just as pleased that the company is doing well. But he is more cautious; in his eyes, he looks like he knows more of what success means, and more of what failure means, too. He can guess at the price of things. He has an older businessman’s impatience with the trumpets of certainty. ‘Things are better than ten years ago. Not good enough yet, but improving all the time.’

  In the Agrexco terminal at Ben Gurion, the loading bay is like the set of a ballet production. Box after box is lifted on to cargo pallets. The forklifts’ pas de deux. A symphony of horns and shouts and rubber doors flying open; bells ringing, engines revving up. The sound of tyres gripping the chilled Tarmac. Everything is cold for the flowers and the cherry tomatoes. Our bunch came in. The carton was placed on a pallet with the other things bound for London. Hundreds of boxes for London that day. Our pallet truck is dragged away by a yellow tractor. Checked for bombs. And soon it is beyond the coolness of the loading bay. Out on the Tarmac. Being lifted into the plane, a Boeing 747 with all the seats ripped out. Like a giant garage. Hot, but just the right temperature above the clouds. Five planes leave every day; each carries 110 tonnes of Israeli produce. The fruits of the soil. The lilies of the field. The plane flew overhead at 7 p.m.

  *

  Beeri Lavi spent two years working in Kenya. He helped to set up an irrigation system. He then managed the farms of the president of the Ivory Coast – growing mangoes, pineapples, avocados – and he took what he had learned back to Israel. He now runs Agrexco’s operation in London. ‘The English mentality about flowers is all change,’ he said. ‘They want variety. New kinds of flower. The lilies are in the supermarkets now, and not only for death. The narcissus was our first flower. That is the one we brought here first. England loves it. Now it wants everything. They want all the flowers.’

  Lavi knows that the English used to buy fewer flowers. ‘There was no money, and it is not a religious count
ry, like Italy. There is less of Easter, less of Christmas. You were spending less on the graves. I was giving advice to the growers. I said, “Give them more pinks, more light blues, orange, and plenty of white. The English wants soft colours.” And you want them cheap; for children to buy.’

  The warehouse in Middlesex was Britishly messy. The men at their forklifts were hurried and cursing. Robbie Williams was revving them up on the radio. Our pallet came from Heathrow just after midnight on Friday, 13 March. Our carton was loaded into a cage. It was bound for London’s New Covent Garden Market.

  Roy Stevens was two hours away from waking up. He would soon wash and shave and drive to Vauxhall. He would come in the middle of the night, set out his wholesale stall and try against the clock to sell those flowers. Those flowers that are dying all the time. Our bunch of lilies was going to Mr Stevens: the first of the English buyers.

  The English are funny about flowers. (Not the British: Scots get into trouble for not being flowery enough, although they are catching the bug; and the Welsh prefer vegetables.) But the funniness has changed. It has become postmodern. The old way of thinking about flowers in England was to do with homeliness, domestic security, heritage, national pride. That was the cultural atmosphere then.

  But the new oddness about flowers is often to do with estrangement. That’s how it seems. Flowers in England, more and more, can seem to give voice to an alien feeling; something of urban disconnectedness. They might speak of a distance from the old steadiness: your parents’ easy belief in home and garden, and the English rose. Some people think the new uses of flowers announces a revival of that same English community; but those grotesque piles of wrapped flowers glinting by the roadside might only say the very opposite. Their cellophane might say it. They are condomised symbols of how it used to be. People don’t touch the flowers; they don’t know them. Their softened colours speak boldly of a lack. And the more they are piled, the more certain you become: the England they conjure is dead on the air.