What you don't know about Valentine's Day flowers

Imagine a business in which a third of the yearly sales of a highly perishable product have to be delivered on one single day -- that's the challenge that Valentine's Day poses for the cut flower industry. About a third of the adults in the U.S. buy flowers or plants for the occasion, roughly half of them choosing roses, mostly red. And it won't surprise you to learn that most of the buyers are men, but here's what amazed me: over a third of the orders for flowers are placed on February 13 and another 22 percent on the 14th. Bad idea, guys -- many shops are sold out, or offer just a few scruffy older roses near the door for the truly desperate.

Photos: Amy Stewart

Wholesale flowers

Even on the global level, the cut flower industry is geared to this day, from growers down to local florists, who start preparing for the big day weeks in advance. In years when the holiday falls midweek, sales are particularly brisk because sending flowers to workplaces is both easy to do and sure to elicit responses from coworkers. This year, with Valentine's Day falling on a Wednesday, florists will see average sales of $30,000 per shop -- all delivered on one day, remember.

While Valentine's Day has its origins in third-century Rome, the tradition of lovers sending notes and flowers didn't start 'til the 1700s. In 1853 a New York Times writer complained that because it fell in February, there are no flowers available for the occasion, so "we must content ourselves with pens, ink, and paper." With advances in greenhouse technology and transportation, it became possible to force flowers to bloom mid-winter and ship them to customers, and florists started promoting them as alternatives to the "frilled paper monstrosities" people were exchanging at the time. Initially, corsages of violets were the gift of choice, but later carnations and roses surpassed them in popularity and today roses are almost de rigueur for the occasion.

Amy Stewart (below)

I learned all this and much more from the book, Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers, published just this week. (Full disclosure: author Amy Stewart and I are partners on the website GardenRant.com.) Stewart traveled the world -- to Ecuador, Holland, Miami and farms in her home state of California -- to learn the secrets of breeding, growing, arranging and selling flowers. Here are a few more highlights from this fascinating book:

Don't bother to smell the roses

According to Stewart, cut flowers are "bred more for their suitability as freight than for any of their more refined qualities -- delicacy, grace, fragrance." They're bred for such qualities as pest resistance, longer vase life, and taller, straighter stems. Another asset, the ability to be raised year-round, explains the ubiquity of such lackluster flowers as carnations and chrysanthemums.

Change hasn't been kind to the industry

Consider all these changes in American life over the last decades from the standpoint of your local florist: shorter hospital stays, more out-patient surgery, weddings that are less traditional, dinner parties adorned with grocery store bunches instead of formal arrangements, funerals with no viewing, and perhaps most grating of all, obituary notices carrying the "in lieu of flowers" request. On top of all that, florists are losing sales to grocery chains and big box stores. Giant order-takers like FTD and Teleflora not only take a commission on every sale but mandate standardized, ho-hum arrangements that many feel are further harming the industry. Then there are those ads for Vermont Teddy Bears with this slur on the floral industry: "Send the creative alternative to flowers." Man, that's gotta hurt. So it's no surprise that since 1997, 3,500 flower shops have closed nationally. And Americans only spend $25 per capita annually on flowers to begin with, compared to, for example, the Swiss, who love cut flowers to the tune of $100 per year per person.

Flower farms — not so pretty

Photo: Amy Stewart

Greenhouse workers

Today fully two-thirds of the $6.2 billion in cut flowers sold in the U.S. annually are imported, mainly from Ecuador and Colombia, and roses are even more likely to be imported, at 90 percent. But because only perfect flowers can pass inspection at the Port of Miami, growers douse their crops in agricultural chemicals that are banned or severely restricted in the U.S. Stewart saw bunches of roses dunked completely in fungicide just prior to shipping and asks, "Do I still want that cheap bouquet of roses if I know it's been sprayed with pesticides that are illegal in the United States and that were applied by a poorly paid Ecuadorian worker in an ill-fitting gas mask?"

Yes, the shocking news about flower production is that two-thirds of flower farmworkers in Ecuador have work-related health problems, and local water resources are damaged by the chemical run-off, as well. Well, there goes our romantic notions of fields of flowers swaying in the breeze, shining in the sun. Turns out they're all grown in greenhouses where the conditions can be controlled exactly -- no insects, no rain, no breeze, no nature at all. Then there are those scary fungicide-dunkings. So if you're harboring fantasies of creating a bed of rose petals for your loved one or dropping rose petals into the bathwater -- bad idea. And don't even think about slicing commercially grown cut flowers into your salads.

Photo: Amy stewart

Going green

In response to such horror stories, the VeriFlora green label certification program has been created for cut flowers in the U.S. The label guarantees both fair trade labor practices and organic or near-organic growing conditions, and Stewart believes this is "the best hope flowers have of winning back their souls, their purity." Currently only six percent of flowers sold carry the green label and few florists even know of its existence. To help support eco-friendly and socially responsible flower production, be sure to tell your florist about the VeriFlora program. They'll only start supplying them if their customers ask.

Are you sure you want those red roses?

I recently spoke with Michael Tavenner of Paul's Wholesale Florist in D.C. for an insider's thoughts about Valentine's Day. First, he confirmed that at least 75 percent of his Valentine's business is roses -- mostly red -- and all of them are from Ecuador and Colombia. And he was eager to offer some advice to local husbands and boyfriends: "Women are sick of roses. They're an expensive, short-lived flower, but men will buy them even when they're butt-ugly." Tavenner complains that men won't shop outside the box no matter what their wives tell them and suggests something a bit more imaginative, like yellow or two-tone roses, or even better -- orchids. Fellas, with the average arrangement of a dozen roses costing more than $70, surely any decent florist can create something that's more interesting for the money, if you'll only let them.

Master Gardener Susan Harris writes about gardening for UDC's Cooperative Extension Service and teaches gardening privately; see - thegardeningcoach.com. She also blogs at gardenrant.com and takomagardener.typepad.com.

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