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26 June | 2021 Alexandra Farms is a niche grower in part of the $34 billion global flower trade. It specializes in a collection of David Austin English garden roses, which have been specifically bred for floristry, as well as garden roses from other prominent breeders. And while the perishable cut-flower clock starts ticking at the snip of the cutting shears, the production process actually begins long before the blades come out. Plant Breeding: Making the Cut Around the world, plant breeders specializing in one or several cut- flower varieties are working in labs and greenhouses to design better flowers for florists and their customers. "It's a mixture of skill, science and luck," the late renowned rose breeder David Austin Sr. used to say. Austin led the way in transforming the roses, creating a new breed of rose for the garden and, subsequently, launching an iconic collection of roses for the cut-flower industry, 15 varieties of which are grown at Alexandra Farms. Crossing parent plants into new offspring can introduce not only new desirable traits in flower color, form and/or stem length but also production variables like disease resistance or lower water or fertilizer needs. But plant breeding is a long game compared to the logistical sprint once a flower is cut. Creating and trailing a successful new flower variety can take up to 10 years! It's a cutthroat process designed to advance only the most promising plants. Breeders of familiar flowers, like Gypsophila paniculata (baby's breath) or Dianthus caryophyllus (carnation), may start with as many as 10,000 new contenders. e competition is fierce through three rounds of increasingly scrutinized selection. It's an ongoing process of crossing and regrowing the promising contenders. e best must ultimately square off with commercially available varieties for a final attempt to outperform and win approval. Only a handful of the contenders make it through the selection process. But building a better bloom doesn't end within the breeder's greenhouse. e promising new lines are offered to propagation growers (the flower farmers' sources for plants) to field trial against current market varieties. If one of the up-and-comers can outperform at this level, the breeders are in business. ey ramp up seed or plant availability, and a new variety is named. e improvements sometimes appear subtle but have a significant impact on the supply chain. One improvement in Gypsophila made by Ball SB, a cut-flower hybridizer in Colombia, is plant resiliency. Older plant varieties of Gypsophila often died after cutting a single flush of blooms, resulting in a farm loss of up to 50 percent of the crop. "Our introductions have reduced

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