Shirley Bond [BScHEc/46] and Don Wilton [BScAgr/46] wouldn’t have crossed paths if it weren’t for the University of Manitoba. She was the eldest daughter of a lawyer, born in Winnipeg and raised in Fort Rouge. He was the eldest son of a farmer, born and raised on a homestead near Roland, Manitoba.

When they first met in 1942, the Fort Garry campus was a fraction of its current size, made up of a dozen brick and stone buildings nestled in a meander of the Red River. The Second World War was ongoing, and the south side of campus, including the residences, had been commandeered by the army for training and housing.

Don Wilton, 1943

Don hadn’t initially planned to be there pursuing a bachelor of science in agriculture. He’d earned an agriculture diploma a few years prior and had returned to the farm, but around Christmas in 1941, he became ill and didn’t get out of bed until the following June. The diagnosis was rheumatic fever, and doctors weren’t sure he’d ever walk again. While he did eventually get back on his feet, his days of doing manual labour were over and he decided to head back to school.

In a story about his life that he wrote in 1997, Don says, “My health was a long way from being A-1 that first year at the U of M. Some of our classes were on the fourth floor of the science building. I was able to make two floors and would have to sit down on the stairs for a breather. Shirley claims that was the first time she noticed me. I really didn’t do it just to get noticed!”

As it turns out, meeting Shirley was the silver lining of everything he’d been through.

She was at UM fresh out of high school, working on a degree in home economics. Like most female students at that time, she was also enrolled in a variety of courses to aid in the war effort.

Shirley Bond

In her own writing, Shirley remembers feeling overwhelmed at university. “I was a very young lady in an entirely new world, one among thousands, few of whom I had ever seen before. The classes were so large, the professors so intimidating. What was I doing here? I asked myself, and then one day the world changed. In physics class I was supposed to be fixing an electric gadget. I wasn’t having too much success when a voice over my shoulder asked if I could use a little help. I sure could and did.”

That voice, of course, belonged to Don. Shortly after, he invited Shirley to a university dance.

“I was a little slow as she had accepted an invite from another fellow,” Don writes. “I found out later that that date was not as exciting as she might have expected. Her date suggested that he would appreciate it if she did not wear lipstick and there were a few other matters he thought he should solve. At one stage during the evening my friend and I went up to the balcony to watch the dancing. There was Shirley sitting with her escort in the balcony on the other side. I got the impression from Shirley’s looks she was not too happy about her evening and I was not helping a bit…I think another problem she had, if I remember correctly, was that her fellow didn’t even dance. We had many a good laugh over that evening. I sure never let anybody else get the jump on me again.”

At a dance together, 1945

A double date of dinner and a show followed in the spring of 1943 and then the university year was finished, and Don went home to the farm for the summer.

“The experiences of a city girl’s visits to the farm were something else,” Shirley writes. “A five-mile ride in the jitney on a mud road from the bus at Roland to the farm, a cracked wash basin in my bedroom, a crow and shotgun blast over the outhouse, an encounter with the electric fence, a stubble field on fire, a sore shoulder from trying out the shotgun, and on and on. I survived and I think I really enjoyed it all.”

In the fall, they returned to campus and their courtship continued through their remaining three years of study. One of the highlights for both was the time they spent together on their way to campus from their homes further downtown.  “Travelling by streetcar and bus took a lot of time,” Don writes. “On most days, I would meet Shirley at the corner of Osborne and Corydon and that made the time spent much more attractive.”

Don and Shirley graduated on May 16,1946 and were married two days later before leaving town on their five-week, 5,000-mile, 500 dollar honeymoon in Don’s 1938 Chevy. Their lives took them from Winnipeg to Minnedosa where Don held the position of agriculture representative for the provincial government. Shirley established and ran the home (a three-room apartment over a shop on Main Street with no running water) and they started their family. In 1949, Don began working for Manitoba Pool Elevators, transferring back to Winnipeg in 1953 where the couple lived for the rest of their lives.

Don and Shirley Wilton at their 50th wedding anniversary, 1996

“Our life together has been pretty wonderful,” Shirley wrote on their 50^th wedding anniversary in 1996. “In the early years, as a 22-year-old mother with my first child and living in a small Manitoba town, I sometimes wondered why I had not taken my mother’s advice to work a few years before getting married and having a family. Now I have my four wonderful children, all with university degrees (from UM) and well established in their life’s work, and eight grandchildren. We have been abundantly blessed.”

Don lovingly cared for Shirley through ill health in the lead up to her death in February 2005. He missed her deeply until the day he died in September 2006. They were truly soul mates for their entire 58 years of married life, and it all started with a chance meeting at the University of Manitoba.  

Obviously, being ancient, it’s not a new idea. But it’s one that is forgotten at our peril, UM classics professor Mark Joyal says.

“The Greeks had great respect for human nature and their stories have lessons,” he says. “We’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that we can change human nature, but human nature is unchangeable. Ancient Greeks realized this, and that’s one of the reasons why they had no difficulty in characterizing all sorts of forces in this world as gods or goddesses, because they recognized these forces are immortal, we can’t change them, and they have power over us.”

“Loves Resistance” by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1885.

Pop star Taylor Swift captures Eros’s bewitchery and irrationality in lyrics like, “Isn’t it just so pretty to think / All along there was some / Invisible string / Tying you to me?” and “This love is good / This love is bad.” The 18th century German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe caught the selflessness of it with the quip, “If I love you, what business is that of yours?”

Deep down we know about it, but if we do forget or overlook Eros, it may be because we know his Roman version better: Cupid. Both Cupid and Eros were unbearably beautiful archers with magical arrows but, Joyal notes, the Roman version morphed into a cultural conceit and over time lost its everyday power. Yet the Greeks stories told it differently.

“The stories aren’t exactly warnings because a warning implies you should resist,” Joyal says. “Stories about Eros are not a warning but a heads up…. You can use reason to overcome it, but you’ll probably be unsuccessful because it’s a god after all and you’re not. Eros will overtake you and it may make you do things at odds with your long-term interests, but in the moment, it is a very attractive thing.”

Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher, makes Eros something different in his dialogue Symposium. (“But you have to remember that most Greeks thought of Eros as a god and at the time didn’t read or know who Plato was,” Joyal says). Here Plato uses Eros to make a philosophical point by framing Eros as an intermediary that can connect us to the gods and ideals and our better selves, even calling Eros a daimon (root of our “demon”), something that can attend to someone from birth. It was an incredibly influential idea, laying the runway for ideas like guardian angles to later land. Plato also tied Eros to same-sex relationships, which is why Eros and Cupid are sometimes treated as gods of homosexuality, but Joyal says Plato was just trying to relate to his audience, which was leisure class males who liked spending time among younger males.

“At the root of it, the Greeks saw Eros as an irrational impulse that brings two things together. It could be two people, two animals, two insects. It’s a force we cannot reason away,” Joyal says. “It’s why sex sells. People might tear their hair out and wish it weren’t so, but it’s so.”

And then there’s Valentine’s Day.

In the United States alone, an estimated $1.9 billion worth of cut flowers are sold on or before Valentine’s Day each year. As Valentine’s Day approaches, and the chill of winter lingers, it leaves one wondering: Where do all these flowers come from? How do those roses get from grower’s land to lover’s hand?

As a professor who studies sustainability, I’ve investigated the impact of many business models, including cut flowers. If there’s enough money to be made (or favour to be won), the social and environmental implications of business decisions often are trumped by short-term economics.

The flower industry

Since 2019, the worldwide cut flower market had been blooming. The market for cut flowers, houseplants and landscape greenery was expected to grow roughly 6.3 per cent over the five years ending in 2024.

But that market wilted to an estimated US$29.2 billion in 2020, a 6.2 per cent contraction from 2019, largely due to the pandemic. In top spot, the United States accounted for US$7.9 billion, or 27 percent of the 2020 global market.

Florists typically sell cut flowers, as well as floral arrangements and potted plants. These items come from both domestic and foreign flower farms and wholesalers. In the U.S. and Canada around 80 per cent of these flowers are imported.

Florists are small businesses. In both Canada and the United States, the average florist has only about two employees. In Canada, the florist industry consists of an estimated 2,822 retail businesses, 5,054 employees and annual sales revenue of $602 million. In the U.S. last year, there were 31,663 florists, with 65,000 employees, in a US$5 billion market.

The cut flower supply chain

The cut flower supply chain often starts in Colombia. About 80 per cent of cut flowers sold in the U.S. are imported. Colombia is the No. 1 country of origin and Ecuador is No. 2.

While the Netherlands produces 80 percent of the world’s tulips, Colombia and Ecuador are the world’s largest producers of carnations and roses, respectively. As a symbol of love and romance, roses are the world’s most popular flowers.

The top four flower producing countries in 2019, in terms of export revenues, were: The Netherlands ($4.6 billion), Colombia ($1.4 billion), Ecuador ($879.8 million) and Kenya ($709.4 million).

Flowers grown on the Bogotá Plateau are cut, combined into bundles and hydrated for up to 24 hours — in preparation to enter the “cold chain.” As roses travel to Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport in refrigerated trucks, shipping and storage temperatures are maintained at about 1C.

Next, those roses are flown to Miami, Fla. In fact, most cut flowers destined for the U.S. or Canada arrive via Miami International Airport.

In the case of Edmonton-based Grower Direct, roses and other cut flowers are loaded onto refrigerated trucks for direct delivery to stores across Canada. The entire journey, from farm to flower shop, takes as little as four days. Despite the speedy journey, 45 per cent of all cut flowers die before they are sold.

Low wages, pesticides and greenhouse gases

Sustainability attempts to balance social, environmental and economic implications of decisions and actions, today and into the future.

While the cut flower industry provides jobs for producers and distributors, there is a price. The International Labor Rights Fund notes that the industry has a reputation for low wages and poor working conditions. Workers on Colombian flower farms are predominantly female. They work 16 or more hours a day for a monthly wage of about $300.

A farm worker cuts roses to be thrown away at the Maridadi Flowers farm in Naivasha, Kenya, on Mar. 19, 2020, after lockdowns and border restrictions strangled the cut flower industry. // AP Photo/Patrick Ngugi

Since flowers are not classified as edible, they are often exempt from pesticide regulations. Thus, many flower production workers in Ecuador and Colombia have suffered from respiratory problems, rashes and eye infections caused by exposure to toxic chemicals in fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides.

The Fairtrade movement is a response to this mistreatment. It aims to improve working conditions for flower farmers and workers, as well as living conditions in their communities, by ensuring they earn a living wage and by protecting their rights.

Moving flowers from South America to North America, in refrigerated trucks and cargo planes, in and out of warehouses along the cold chain, yields a large carbon footprint. During a typical peak season, 30-35 cargo planes arrive in Miami from Bogotá every day to meet American demand. While local production would ground some of those flights, growing flowers in greenhouses can use as much energy as shipping them from Colombia by air freight.

COVID-19 impact

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a “global pandemic.” The timing could hardly have been worse for the cut flower industry.

Flower shop employees destroy unsold flowers in St. Petersburg, Russia, after shops were ordered closed to limit the spread of the coronavirus, on Apr. 13, 2020. // AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky

Spring is the industry’s busy season, with weddings, Easter and Mother’s Day. But soon, weddings were being postponed and flower shops closed. As lockdowns went into place around the world, the market wilted. Growers in Kenya and Colombia began to toss roses away.

Now, as lockdowns and other restrictions begin to ease up, there is optimism that 2021 will be better, starting with Valentine’s Day. Indeed, the Society of American Florists anticipates “the biggest Valentine’s Day in decades” in 2021.

But what if you forget to bring a bouquet of roses to your Valentine on Sunday? You could remind him or her or them about the social and/or environmental ills of the cut flower industry.

Or, you could just buy the damn flowers. But be sure they are Fairtrade certified or locally grown. And be sure to wear a mask.

This article from Paul D. Larson, CN Professor of Supply Chain Management, University of Manitoba, was published on The Conversation. It appears here under a Creative Commons licence.

Jessica Cameron is a professor in social psychology at the University of Manitoba

Top Three Signs You’re in a Good Relationship:

1. You’re happy! Specifically, you’re happier in your relationship than you were before it.
2. You feel supported and valued by your partner. When you have a problem, your partner’s reaction makes you feel valued. When you think you might need help, you are confident your partner will be there for you.
3. Your partner is also happy and feels supported and valued by you. Sometimes this is hard to figure out but usually people who are unhappy start to show signs, especially once the hope that things will get better wears off.

Three Warning Signs You’re Not in the Right Kind of Relationship for You:

1. You can’t remember any good times in your relationship. Things feel bad now and they seem like they’ve always been that way.
2. You or your partner express contempt towards each other. Relationship expert John Gottman says that couples who express disrespect towards each other (e.g., being mean and hurtful on purpose) are more likely to dissolve their relationships.
3. You feel more insecure than you did before your relationship. If a partner undermines your sense of self-worth, then your own relationship satisfaction is probably dropping too. Relationships where one partner “pushes” the other down, perhaps to feel better or more secure themselves, are destructive and more likely to dissolve.

Three Tips for Valentine’s Day (for Well-Established Couples):

1. One of the best ways to reconnect and enhance the bond between partners is to try something brand new together. Take a ballroom dancing lesson or learn to cross-country ski together. The key is doing something new together that you both want to do. If only one of you wants to be there, the other one may resent having to do something they have no interest in and resentment towards a partner doesn’t lead to connection/intimacy.
2. Experience and express gratitude. It is easy in well-established relationships to take a partner for granted. Think about the ways your partner makes your life easier (maybe they always wash the dishes) or express that they know or understand you (i.e. they make a cup of coffee for you every morning). And then tell them you appreciate it. It’s important that people know, at least time to time, that someone appreciates the things they do and recognize their gestures for what they are (i.e. acts of love).
3. Recognize that there’s a lot of social pressure for romance on Valentine’s Day. Although some people may enjoy “over the top” romance, others do not. What would your partner enjoy? In new relationships, the conversation might be pretty awkward, but it’s pretty important so that one partner doesn’t end up disappointed or unnecessarily overdoing it.