Every other year, CalFlowers hosts its Fun 'N Sun conference, Monterey, Calif,  July 29-August 1.  During this event, the group that helps get flowers from the field to the consumer will honor floral industry visionary Yoshimi Shibata for the 2015 Distinguished Service Award.  Honorees of this award are recognized for the highest levels of leadership, strategic thinking and contributions to the floral industry.

Shibata led San Jose, Calif.-based Mt. Eden Floral Company, formerly Mt. Eden Nursery, for more than 55 years.  Founded in 1906, Mt Eden’s hallmark was its ability to adapt to change.  The company’s many notable achievements range from the innovation of cooperative flower “pools” for roses and chrysanthemums; helping create better packing and working with the air freight industry for shipping; establishing new greenhouses, breeding and propagation programs.

Growers’ tours, with their abundance of color, scent and generally amazing photo opportunities, tend to bring out the happy in people, even those who work in, and around, flowers all day. Attendees of the 2015 CalFlowers bi-annual Fun ’N Sun convention July 29-August 1 will get plenty of happy at this year’s round of five amazing farms located in the Monterey, Calif. area.

As part of the always-amazing conference agenda, attendees will climb aboard buses on Thursday, July 30 with a breakfast box and be transported to the greenhouses and fields of five leading California growers, representing a broad variety of the many unique and widely distributed California Grown products.