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International Events: European Flair
| Chris Beytes
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>> Published Date: 12/15/2008
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Just as investors keep a close eye on China and Asia to see how their stock markets have performed overnight, the global floriculture industry watches the Netherlands for coming trends in flowers, plants, greenhouse technology and marketing. And the best place for an annual check of where our industry is and where it’s headed is Horti Fair, the giant trade show held every fall in Amsterdam.
The 2008 edition of Horti Fair, held Oct 14 to 17 at the RAI exhibition center, is still a major international event, even though traffic has declined from its peak of more than 60,000 in 2003 to 47,730 this year, up slightly from 2007. This year 900 companies exhibited, compared with 985 in 2007. But it’s safe to say that the trade show business is changing along with the rest of our industry. Cut flower and greenhouse manufacturers still love the event, but many of the seed and vegetative plant companies, some of whom returned after several years hiatus, say they may not be there next year. IPM Essen in Germany is the international show that bedding plant companies say is the best for them. But considering the current economy, who can forecast what will happen next fall?
We do know what happened last fall in Amsterdam. Here are some of the show highlights, plus a look inside the Aalsmeer Market, an up-and-coming local event in nearby Aalsmeer that attracts almost as much attention as Horti Fair itself. Plus, we take you on a tour inside Wetering Potlilium, home of the Lily Looks line of Asiatic pot lilies.
Editor’s note: Horti Fair 2009 will be held Tuesday, October 13 to Friday, October 16, at the RAI Exhibition Center in Amsterdam.
 Flexible spacing robot
This new pot-spacing robot from equipment manufacturer TTA puts individual servo motors on each pot fork, which allows for a wider range of pot spacings with just the push of a button, rather than changing out the whole fork. Also, you can quickly change forks for different pot sizes (they’re even working on automatic pot-size changes). And it’s fast—moving at a speed of 800 to 900 cycles per hour. www.tta.eu
Floralife Transport CARE paper
Imagine this: a flower preservative product inspired by the shoe industry? That’s Floralife’s new Transport CARE paper, a wax floral paper impregnated with chlorine dioxide to inhibit the spread of botrytis. The paper (shown off here by Floralife’s Jim Daly and Carol Schram) is used in place of newspaper or plain paper in packing boxes for shipment from farm to florist. Aimed primarily at the cut rose market, where botrytis spread inside the packing cases can be a problem, the paper’s qualities last for 7 to 10 days. Oh, about the connection to the shoe industry: You know those little wads of paper you find stuffed into the toes of your new shoes? Yep. Same stuff. www.floralife.com
 Cut heat, not light
If you want to reduce summer greenhouse heat without drastically reducing light levels, try ReduHeat by Mardenkro. It might look like ordinary whitewash for glass or poly, but if diluted to provide 50% shade, it actually cuts the heat-causing near-infrared down to just 25% (at a 1:2 dilution), making it excellent for crops that need cool temperatures but high light. At different dilutions, figure on getting 25% more growth-promoting PAR than near infrared. It’s easy to clean off with ReduClean. www.mardenkro.com
Plastic cooling pads
Regular corrugated cooling pads work great and are a staple of greenhouses worldwide, especially in hot climates, but they are expensive to maintain and replace … and unfortunately, water and cardboard don’t work well together for very long. JES Products has developed a polypropylene cooling pad called Cool-Net AK150 that they say will last 40 years. They’re pressure-cleanable and UV resistant, and they withstand chemicals and bleaches. And they’re said to be just as effective as cardboard cooling pads, due to their tremendous surface area. They’re 60 cm wide and 15 cm thick, and because of their strength can be made to most any height. Colors include black, beige, or even patterns, should you want to get fancy. And they’re recyclable. info@jesproducts.nl
 Vertical gardening
If gardening space is at a premium, why not go vertical? And now with VertiGarden, a modular vertical growing system, it’s easy to create colorful wall panels of blooming and decorative plants. Developed in the UK by Ball Colegrave (that’s Colegrave’s Ian Cole in the photo), the 2.15 sq. ft. panels can be used singly or linked together to create large wall or fence coverings. Each panel holds 16 plants, and has built-in irrigation lines that can be connected to each other and to a tank-fed or automatic drip system. In England, they’re sold empty for consumers to plant or already planted (three fit on a CC trolley shelf). Ball is testing them in the U.S. this spring. www.vertigarden.com
Americans enjoy the show
By all anecdotal accounts, attendance by the North American industry was down. We seemed to encounter fewer U.S. and Canadian growers than in years past. But one stalwart Horti Fair exhibitor is Dramm Corporation from xxx, Wisconsin. Here’s Dramm xxx Kurt Becker (left), chatting with fellow Americans, professors Brian Whipker and Ray Cloyd; Brian’s tech Ingram McCall; and professors Kim Williams (who is also Ray’s wife) and Joyce Latimer.
Colored pots … and we mean color!
Tired of green, white, black and terracotta? AKG Hortiproducts showed off some of the most colorful plastic growing pots (the “Orinoco” line) and pot covers (the “Nevada” line) we’ve ever seen. They’re available in any color you can imagine, and the minimum order for custom colors is just 10,000 pots. Naturally, they’re more expensive than ordinary pots (by about 25% or so), but what price can you put on standing out and making a statement! A-Roo is the distributor in the U.S., and they tell me they have samples available. www.a-roo.com, www.akg.nl/hortiproducts.
Decorative lighting for houseplants?
Why not? You put lights in your outdoor landscape, so why not indoors, too? Actually, the I-Light, by Taiwan’s Nano Bio Light Technology Co., is more than just decorative. It also provides supplemental LED lighting for houseplants, helping them live longer under indoor conditions … and we all know the health benefits of houseplants, right? They’re currently setting up U.S. distribution. They have a sleek, modern leaf shape and come in various light colors for a range of indoor effects (pictured is Dr. WeiFang, the inventor). Price has not yet been set. info@nano-wave.com.tw.
 Lanz Sticking machine
The Holy Grail of equipment companies has been the machine for sticking cuttings automatically, but so far they’ve only been experimental, due to cost and complexity. Lanz Gartenbautechnik of Germany, which makes trimming machines that are used primarily with woody ornamentals, has a cutting sticker that works with any stiff, woody cutting. Rather than being encumbered with troublesome cameras and software, the machine utilizes employees to lay cuttings on a belt in neat rows, so a gripper can pick them up and stick them into an awaiting tray. Whether or not this simplified sticking system can be applies to common vegetative annuals depends on many factors, including stem stiffness and foliage size, but at least companies are working on the technology. (Jochem Lanz pictured.) www.lanz-technik.de
Ball strikes gold
Ball Horticultural Company (parent company of GrowerTalks) took home two gold medals for booth quality in the bedding plant and cut flower classes on the first day of Horti Fair. Their stand earned a gold medal for the best Bedding Plant Presentation as well as for the best Diverse Cut Flower Presentation. The award was extra special, seeing how this was Ball’s first time back to Horti Fair after an absence of several years.
Packaging ideas from the Clock
We’re always on the lookout for new ideas in packaging plants. This year, most of the good concepts we saw came from one place: FloraHolland, which is the big Dutch flower auction (the only one, actually, since the merger last year of Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer and FloraHolland). FloraHolland took a five-way sustainable approach to packaging: Be Pure, Be Fair, Be Green, Be Good and Be Positive. (Remember, these are currently concepts, not actual programs. But they are subject to copyright protection.)
- Be Pure incorporates simple flowers and natural packaging products, such as used peanut sacks for sleeves and wooden disks for labels.
- Be Fair is a concept that promotes plants from different parts of the world with the personal signature of the person who bred or produced the young plants. The story is that nearly 5 billion people survive on less than $3 a day, and the Be Fair concept helps developing world workers get a fair price for their products.
- Be Green uses packaging products that can be “reabsorbed” into nature—such as flower wrapping paper made from compressed rice hulls and impregnated with flower seeds—bury the paper in your garden when you are done with it and watch flowers come up!
- Be Good is something we already do here—using purchases of plants to help fund charities, such as breast cancer research (as does this Pink Ribbon program).
- Be Positive reinforces the idea that flowers make you feel good. This concept packages cut gerberas into friendly smiley faces that are also easy to handle in the traditional distribution channel, from grower to consumer.
Aalsmeer: Where Growers Strut Their Stuff
The Aalsmeer market has become a must-see show during Horti Fair. Held for three days at the nearby FloraHolland (formerly Aalsmeer) Auction building, it’s where 500 local growers show off finished potted plants, cut flowers and woody ornamentals to 6,000 mainly European buyers. It’s a good place to see what’s coming out of Dutch nurseries.
This year we noted the same trends as in previous years: handles (for shop-and-go convenience); coordinating ceramic pots (ready-made home décor); upgraded packaging—top-dressing, fabric wraps, ting-ting and other accessories; and a wide range of holiday and novelty packaging schemes, such as adding candle holders to English ivy pots.
We walked Aalsmeer with trend expert Stacy Sirk, buyer of “found objects” for new garden center retailer Terrain (of Urban Outfitters fame). Stacy quickly pointed out one European flower trend: flower arrangements made using concentric circles of stems, each circle consisting of one variety. As soon as she brought this to our attention we spotted several other examples, including a bulb planter—proving that you can easily adapt cut flower trends to garden plants. Try this one in some of next spring’s combo planters!
Looking at Lilies
Each year during Horti Fair GrowerTalks takes the time to explore some interesting aspect of the Dutch floriculture industry. We’ve looked at internal transport, new structures, roses, bromeliads, sorting and packing … this year we were invited to take a look behind the scenes at a line of dwarf pot Asiatic lilies called Lily Looks, which, though fairly new to the market have a long and interesting history. We traveled with Ben Kneppers, sales rep for Zibo Plant of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which, along with 2Plant International of Powell, Ohio, markets Lily Looks in North America.
Lily Looks originated in the 1980s at Oregon Bulb Farms as the Pixie series, a line of dwarf pot lilies in about 10 colors. Oregon Bulb sold the line to another Oregon business, Cebeco Lilies, which continued breeding work on the line. Then Cebeco sold the genetics to Mak Breeding in Holland, owned by well-known Dutch lily breeder Nic Mak. Nic continued working on the compact lilies, using the Pixie genetics and his own genetics to create the Tiny series. He focused on high bud count, strong stems, dark foliage and no bud abortion. He tested them extensively, including in the US, at Michigan State and University of Georgia.
Meanwhile, another Dutch grower, Peter van de Wetering, along with his brother, Marco, was building up a cut lily business, and then got into pot lilies, including Pixies. In the ’90s they decided to go into lilies in a big way, eventually building a dedicated facility, Wetering Potlilium, and pursuing their own line of genetics. That led them to buy all the Tiny varieties from Mak Breeding.
Having their own genetics meant more control of their destiny … but it also meant having an excess of bulbs, so they connected with Zabo Plant and 2Plant International to handle sales and distribution of the new “Lily Looks” line (as the van de Weterings named the new brand) internationally. They launched Lily Looks at OFA in 2007.
Mak Breeding continues to develop new pot lilies, seeking large flowers, great colors, excellent foliage holding, natural dwarfness and even double flowers … which they hope to launch shortly. The current line has 18 varieties but there’s lots more in the pipeline, including some striking bicolors and oriental/trumpet crosses. www.zaboplant.com, www.2plant.com, www.lilylooks.com.
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