Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms out there! Hopefully, many of you were the recipients of your favorite treats today – quite possibly flowers! If you did get flowers and if they have the Whole Trade Guarantee™ seal on them, you can know that they helped support communities and families (and moms!) where they were produced. Here is the story of one mom behind the flowers.

Maria lives in Juan Pablo Sesundo, Colombia and works on a farm producing Whole Trade Guarantee flowers. She has been with the farm for 11 years (and working in the flower industry for 22 years). Maria works the flower beds in the greenhouse, maintains the crop and harvests the flowers. “Every day I come to work with a positive attitude filled with love that makes me want to do my best. Our farm is filled with people who love their job and are very devoted to producing the best and most beautiful flowers that we can,” says Maria.

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With Earth Day right around the corner and the talk of “green” in the air, the timing couldn’t be better to share the scoop on our recent trip to check out a certified organic flower producer. On a cool sunny morning last week, five of us from Whole Food Market met excited to tour a Southern California flower grower and gain a better understanding about their organic program. We were not disappointed!

Looking in any direction, the landscape was a visual patchwork of different textures with each crop. The hills and valleys were each a microclimate, creating ideal growing conditions. Eucalyptus and waxflower dominated the landscape with all kinds of treasures (like protea and sunflowers) mixed in. The majority of the crops were South African and Australian natives – certainly less common than a rose or tulip here in the states, but no less beautiful (and in most cases they last two to three times longer than a “typical” flower). Read the rest of this entry »