Take the Chicago Board of Trade, add a little New York Stock Exchange, cover it all with more flowers than you'll find in the Tournament of Roses Parade, and you have Aalsmeer, Amsterdam's Wall Street of Flowers
Remember what red roses cost on Valentine's Day?

The market price was likely set in three seconds by a bleary-eyed, coffee-swilling, stressed-out buyer bidding in the world's largest flower auction at Aalsmeer, a small Dutch town near Amsterdam. The system originated 100 years ago with "green auctions," where buyers would gather in a farmer's field to bid on vegetables. Aalsmeer's flower growers adopted the idea, formed a cooperative, and in 1911 held the first auction, in a coffeehouse.

Today, that cooperative has more than 3,000 members, and the coffeehouse has been replaced by a sprawling, 350-acre complex, where 2.1 million cut flowers and plants - $21 billion worth per year - come in every weekday, go on the block, and move on. No wonder the auction building itself is one million square meters- that's 250 acres or 165 soccer fields - making it the world's largest commercial edifice, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Workers whiz around on bicycles because distances are too far to walk.

Open round-the-clock on weekdays, Aalsmeer Flower Auction is a self-­contained world of color, fragrance, and frantic activity. The main building houses five auction rooms, a dispatch and loading center, forwarders, customs and plant protection services, banks, and restaurants. Flowers and plants arrive in the middle of the night, trucked in from Dutch greenhouses or ?own to nearby Schiphol Airport from nurseries in Kenya, Israel, Ecuador, Spain, and elsewhere. Exporters and wholesalers are in their offices by 5 a.m. to prepare for the day's buying.