Amy Stewart’s award-winning book Flower Confidential, which was a New York Times best seller, takes us behind the scenes of the business of world-wide flower growing. Here is the book’s report on Nevado Ecuador.

I was at roberto nevado’s farm in Ecuador just as it was working toward its VeriFlora® certification. Nevado Ecuador is situated in the Cotopaxi province south of Quito, where the snowcapped volcano of the same name reaches over 19,000 feet and dominates the horizon. This region, with its sweeping plains, good soil, and a ready workforce from the countryside and from the province’s capital, Latacunga, has become a kind of secondary flower-growing region to Cayambe.

Nevado bills itself as “Roses with a Conscience,” and it’s got the plaques on the wall to back that claim up: it’s won certifications from the Swiss, German, Dutch, Ecuadorian, and the new American VeriFlora^® programs, among others. Its goal is to remain the most certified grower in the world.

At first I was surprised by how much the world’s most certified flower farm

World’s Tallest roses Watch a video of roses being packed and prepared for shipping around the globe.

looked like any other farm I’d seen. There were the same rows of hoop-houses, the same towering plants pushing rosebuds high above my head, the same radios blasting popular music (some growers believe that a particular type of music makes the plants grow faster, but most agree that the best strategy for the plants is to play whatever music the workers like best). A few greenhouses held hydroponic roses, the only ones I’d seen in Ecuador, but for the most part it was hard to distinguish this from its neighbors. In the production room I had to ask why the workers wore so little protective

ROSES IN THE ANdES: High altitude and cool nights provide ideal growing conditions (top); John nevado (far left) and his father roberto nevado stand in front of a new section of their farm that has fully transitioned to organic practices for Organic Bouquet; roses being packed (near left).