In spring 2014, I met Tecla Aerts, a trim, blue-eyed humanresources advisor in her mid-fifties at FloraHolland Aalsmeer. An acquaintance of ours who works at the auction had given her an early draft of this book, which she read. “Suddenly I began to notice how Calvinistic this industry really is,” she told me. “I mean I’ve worked here ten years, I guess I knew it, but I didn't really see it before. It's not only white and male and all that: there are a lot of religious people, too. There's a bedrijfsgebed, a company prayer, along with daily news items, that appears in people's inboxes.” One of the few women of authority at the institution, a friend of Ms. Aerts’, told her she had recently gone to one of the company's monthly prayer meetings, which usually thirty or forty people attend. This woman, a lesbian, apparently felt comfortable enough there to describe it as a great networking opportunity.

Though I knew of a space set aside for Salat for Muslim workers on the floor, this was the first I’d heard of Christian prayer meetings at FloraHolland, something that might conjure more severe images of intolerance for a contemporary American. But otherwise I wasn't shocked by the religiosity she described. Many flower growers in the Netherlands come from the Dutch Bible Belt, a swath of the country that's significant but rather small (and not influential compared to the U.S.). The Bible Belt tends to vote for the Christian Democratic Alliance, a center-right party, and generally subscribes to Calvinistic values: work hard, pray, take care of your neighbors, don't show off, do it not for yourself but for your community. Of course, this outlook is not confined to the Bible Belt: the sensibility is part of Dutch culture as well as its flower industry.