Flower Export (II)

choi

The flower business  | The Wild Bunch. Frenetic, competitive, multifarious, filthy and beautiful: the flower business is an emblem of Manhattan. Economist, Dec 20, 2014.
www.economist.com/news/christmas ... ful-flower-business

Note:
(1) "THE Temple of Dendur was built on the Nile in 15BC by the emperor Augustus for the goddess Isis of Philae. Its ruin now sits in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, in an atrium bathed in light from Central Park. Today, at the paws of a Sphinx staring out towards Long Island, there is mayhem."
(a) Temple of Dendur
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Dendur
(of sandstone; section 2 Relocation)
(b) Isis
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis
("The name Isis means 'Throne.'  Her headdress is a throne. As the personification of the throne, she was an important representation of the pharaoh's power. The pharaoh was depicted as her child, who sat on the throne she provided. Her cult was popular throughout Egypt, but her most important temples were at Behbeit El-Hagar in the Nile delta, and, beginning in the reign with Nectanebo I (380–362 BCE), on the island of Philae in Upper Egypt")
(c)
(i) Philae
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philae
(an island in Lake Nasser; [actually:] "It [Philae] was, as the plural name indicates, the appellation of two small islands * * * Despite being the smaller island, Philae proper was, from the numerous and picturesque ruins formerly there, the more interesting of the two")
(ii) For pronunciation, see
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/philae
(d) sphinx
Gallery 131 - The Temple of Dendur in The Sackler Wing Part of Egyptian Art. Met, undated
www.metmuseum.org/visit/museum-map/galleries/egyptian/131
(Sphinx of Hatshepsut: “This colossal sphinx portrays the female pharaoh Hatshepsut with the body of a lion and a human head wearing a nemes headcloth and royal beard. * ** It was one of at least six granite sphinxes that stood in Hatshepsut's mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri”)
(i) headgear “nemes”
(A) nemes
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemes
(B) I can not find any dictionary that contains the word. So its etymology and pronunciation are unknown to me.
(ii) beard
(A) Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighteenth_Dynasty_of_Egypt
("Hatshepsut. Daughter of Thutmose I, she ruled jointly as her stepson Thutmose III's co-regent. She soon took the throne for herself, and declared herself pharaoh. While there may have been other female rulers before her, she is the only one who used the symbolic beard")
(B) pharaoh
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh
(section 1 Title origin; section 4.1 Khat and nemes headdresses; legend to illustration 1: After Djoser [a pharaoh's name] of the third dynasty, pharaohs were usually depicted wearing the nemes headdress, a false beard, and an ornate kilt)
(C) Fragment of the Beard of the Great Sphinx; From Giza, Egypt; Perhaps New Kingdom, 14th century BC. British Museum, undated
www.britishmuseum.org/explore/hi ... beard_of_the_g.aspx
("The sphinx takes the form of a lion's body with a royal head, symbolizing the immense power of the king. The fragment shows the beard to have been of the plaited, 'divine' type, depicted on gods and the dead, rather than kings and the living (see an example on the sarcophagus of Sasobek, also in The British Museum). However, it is doubtful whether it would have had a beard when first carved in about 2550 BC; it was probably added during restoration work in the Eighteenth Dynasty (about 1550-1295 BC), and fell off in antiquity")
(D) Egyptian Pharaoh, Penn Museum, undated
www.penn.museum/documents/educat ... evisit_combined.pdf
("Cleopatra VII [69-30 BC; reign 51-30 BC] was the last" pharaoh; page 2: "Have you noticed that pharaohs always have a beard? This is called false beard. In real-life, most Egyptian men [in ancient times] were clean shaven, but pharaohs, even the females ones, wore fake beards. Usually the beards were plaited like a big braid. No one is really sure why the ancient egyptian pharaohs did this, but it somehow connected the pharaoh to the gods")
(e)
(i) Deir el-Bahri
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_el-Bahari
(Arabic, literally meaning, "The Northern Monastery;" in the present-day city of Luxor)
(ii) Luxor
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxor
(the site of the Ancient Egyptian city of Thebes; section 1 Etymology)

choi

(2) "In a few hours a dinner will be held here in honour of a modern-day pharaoh, Leonard Lauder, a cosmetics billionaire who has donated over $1 billion of cubist art to the Met. An army of future Oscar winners temporarily working as waiters is being told how not to drop food on the laps of some of the world’s richest people. Leon Black, Wilbur Ross and John Paulson, all apex Wall Street predators, are among the guests."
(a) Leon Black
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Black
(1951- )
(b) Wilbur Ross
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilbur_Ross
(1937-)
(c) John Paulson
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Paulson
(1955- )

(3) “Tonight’s effort makes the old man’s bouquets look like plastic roses. For each table, Remco has designed a subtle and luxurious cluster of dahlias, silver brunia, tulips, sweet peas, anemones and dusty miller (which has metallic, furry leaves).”
(a) Mike Cross (1946- )
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Cross_(musician)
, The Old Man's Bouquet (whose lyrics appear in
www.thelyricarchive.com/song/927 ... Old-Man%27s-Bouquet
), is a song in the 1989 Prodigal Son album.
(b)
(i) Brunia is a genus name of a plant.
(ii) Silver Brunia Balls
www.fiftyflowers.com/product/Silver-Brunia-Balls_38.htm

may be fresh or dried. The scientific name of the species is Brunia laevis, native to South Africa. Search images.google.com with (Brunia laevis flower)--no quotation marks--and you will see these balls are flower buds, particularly this magnifying view:
roncorylus.wordpress.com/page/2/#jp-carousel-4426

This is a photo which appeared in
Ronnie Hazell, Cape Dutch Architecture. blog name: "Roncorylus; Hiking in the Overberg," Nov 6, 2014.
(c) For dusty miller, see Dusty Miller
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dusty_Miller
(also the common name of several plants [such as] Centaurea cineraria [qv])

(4) “In the bodegas on upper Broadway Korean shopkeepers sell fume-choked bunches for five bucks, with the implicit promise they won’t wilt until midnight and might save your marriage.”

General Requirements for Commercial Fresh Cut Flower and Foliage Imports. Department of Agriculture, Australia, undated
www.agriculture.gov.au/biosecuri ... wer-foliage-imports
("All cut flowers are fumigated on arrival unless there is a fumigation exemption")

choi

(5) “At 4.30 on Monday morning at 28th Street and Seventh Avenue, Manhattan really is a jungle. Huge palm trees loom over the dark pavement. * * * The flower market at 28th Street is the historic heart of America’s $18 billion flower industry. * * * a place that sells dead plants with names such as ‘Hot Eskimo’ [which is a kind of pink rose, whereas ‘Eskimo,’ white rose] and ‘Charming Babe Spray [orange rose].’ [A female florist was greeted with] ‘Hiya sweet pea’ * * * 28th Street is a shadow of its former self * * * From a peak of roughly 60 wholesalers, 28th Street now has just over a dozen. * * * Plenty of Greek families who found their children didn’t fancy a lifetime of 4am starts sold out.”)
(a) Cara Buckley, Midtown’s Lush Passage. New York Times, June 28, 2009
www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/nyregion/28stop.html
(“a block of West 28th Street, between Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue, whittled down over the years by soaring real estate prices and condominium encroachment”)

Quote:

Caribbean Cuts (store name) "specializes in tropicals and exotics from Puerto Rico, and fancy clippings like lotus pods ($3 apiece) and fan palms ($6 a stem)

"When the temperature rises above 45 degrees [Palms trees can not withstand cold], soaring palm and bamboo trees from Chris King of Plants and Foliage * * * line the north side of the sidewalk, forming a lush hallway ($75 and up). Hotel and event planners rent trees here; smaller plants are sold inside [to prevent theft].

* There is no need to read the r4est of the NYT report.
(b) Hiya (origin: alteration of how are you)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hiya
(c) sell out (vi): “to dispose of one's goods by sale; especially :  to sell one's business”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sell%20out

(6) “Once upon a time in America  No one is exactly sure what grew in New York before the city took over. The climate has been pretty stable since the ice melted on Long Island 10,000 years ago, but, since then, there have been waves of floral as well as human migration: 40% of the area’s species are non-native, reckons Rob Naczi, a botanist at the New York Botanical Garden. The first survey was only done in 1743 by Cadwallader Colden, a Scot whose name is almost as magnificent as his life was prodigious: he was governor of New York, wrote a critique of Isaac Newton and fathered at least 11 children. Scientists’ best guess at the original state of nature can be found in the botanical garden in the Bronx. Michael Hagen, a curator, points out New York’s miraculous floral indigenes: the delicate red cardinal flower, pollinated by ruby-throated hummingbirds that migrate from the Gulf of Mexico; the purple pitcher plant, a carnivorous herb that traps bugs in its trumpet-like leaves. Between the 17th and 19th centuries plants such as these were a sensation in Europe.“
(a) For red cardinal flower, see Lobelia cardinalis
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobelia_cardinalis
([also known as] cardinal flower; is a species of Lobelia native to the Americas, from southeastern Canada south through the eastern and southwestern United States, Mexico and Central America to northern Colombia)
(b) For purple pitcher plant, see Sarracenia purpurea
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarracenia_purpurea

(7) “Florists made fortunes on the three ‘major days’: Christmas, Valentine’s and Mother’s, and the minor days such as Thanksgiving and Easter. During the dips weddings, funerals and get-well gifts kept the cash tills full. As the florists boomed, so did the wholesalers who supplied them. But this latter-day paradise couldn’t last either. Supermarkets were starting to sell flowers, buying them direct from growers. A relaxation of licensing rules allowed Manhattan bodegas to erect cheap flower stalls against their walls. And technology was about to transform how flowers were sold and distributed.”

In this report, “florists” means retailers.

choi

(8) Jim McCann in 1986 bought 1-800-FLOWERS and offer[ed] a service that took phone orders and directed them to local florists to fulfil. Then his brother, Chris, in 1994 saw the internet’s promise. Their firm was the first in any industry to execute an e-commerce order on AOL, then America’s main internet provider. Today 1-800-FLOWERS has annual sales of $736m, most of them online. ‘We caught lightning in a bottle,’ Jim McCann says. The next big thing is mobile-phone orders: nearly half of the company’s web traffic now comes from smartphones.”
(a) catch/capture lightning in a bottle: "chiefly US: to succeed in a way that is very lucky or unlikely" Merriam-Webster Learner's dictionary
www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/lightning
(b) lightning in a bottle
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lightning_in_a_bottle
(etymology)

(9) “When people think of creative destruction in the economy, steel or Detroit’s car industry spring to mind. But flowers have felt Schumpeter’s scythe just as sharply. In 1970 Americans shopped at local florists, who were supplied by wholesale markets, which bought from American farms. Now Americans buy 80% of their flowers from abroad, with about 66 cents of every dollar spent in supermarkets or online. * * * mostly, consumers seem happy. They can choose from a global cornucopia of blooms. * * * For the traditional cut-flower industry, however, all this has been a bloodbath. Since 1992 the number of florist shops in America has fallen from 27,000 to 15,000. In 1985 Manhattan’s telephone directory listed 636 stores; Google Maps shows under 300 today. Florists complain they are becoming captives of internet order-aggregators, who use them to fulfil orders but take an unfair cut. Whereas 28th Street once handled over 10% of American flower volumes, today its share is less than 3%. In other countries wholesalers reacted to change by bandying together, moving markets to new locations with lower costs and more parking.”

bandy (vt, vi): “archaic :  to band together”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bandy

(10) “Tigers, not pansies  By 10am 28th Street is revealed as what it really is: a zone of contest in which new, invasive species [humans] are on the rampage. Irritated office-workers stumble over flower boxes. Blond social X-rays in high heels haggle over individual hydrangea stems.
(a) pansy (n): “(US, slang) an effeminate man; esp., an effeminate male homosexual (often a contemptuous term)”
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/american/pansy
(b) social X-ray: "very thin/anorexic female socialite, from Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities"
www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=social x-ray

(11) “To survive, wholesalers have specialised. * * * Chris King * * *  offers Dracaena Arborea, a jungle tree he grows on his farm in Florida and rents out for parties. The secret is to feed the trees ground fish, he says.”
(a) “Dracaena (/drəˈsiːnə/; derived from the romanized form of the Ancient Greek drakaina female dragon; is a genus of about 40 species of trees and succulent shrubs)  Wikipedia
(b) Go to images.google.com to see Dracaena Arborea. It does not look exotic, in my view.

(12) “Manhattan’s remaining retail florists, meanwhile, are giving up on funerals and get-well gifts for the masses and instead target a growing class of wealthy folk and corporations. * * * George Soros’s wedding in 2013 at his estate in Bedford, New York, featured a giant, floral hot-air balloon. A high-end Manhattan wedding might have a budget of $5m, of which 10-15% is spent on flowers and set design.”

The then 83-year-old George Soros got married (for the third time) at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, at Bedford (town), New York (specifically, the hamlet of Katonah).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_(town),_New_York

(13) “The rich have their drawbacks. One-in-the-morning phone calls from millionaire bridezillas about lilies aren’t much fun. And the business is tied more than ever to Wall Street”

That is 1 am.