How those flowers get to Mom

"Flower Confidential," by Amy Stewart, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hil

According to Amy Stewart, Mother's Day (yes, it's Sunday) is one of the four busiest times of the year for a flower shop. Valentine's Day, Christmas and Easter are the others. Nearly a third of all annual cut-flower sales take place on Valentine's Day. Two-thirds of the orders will be from men, half of whom will want red roses on that day.

Mothers, it seems, are more tolerant. They don't mind receiving flowers a few days early or a few days late, thereby spreading the sales over several, less frantic days for florists. And on Mother's Day, the flowers won't all be about roses, but rather arrangements of mixed flowers -- carnations, larkspur, mums and lilies. Such intriguing facts pepper Stewart's easy-to-read "Flower Confidential," although parts require a second reading to parse the statistics.

The cut-flower industry is big business in the United States, accounting for nearly $6 billion in sales each year. We may be surprised to learn that the majority (78 percent) of cut flowers are now imported to the United States tariff-free from Latin America, primarily Colombia and Ecuador. The reasons: cheap labor, mild temperatures and plenty of sunshine.

You will be further surprised to learn the route that a cut flower takes from greenhouse to Mom. On Monday, a rose is sitting in a rural greenhouse in Ecuador. It's cut, loaded on a cart, graded by stem size, stripped of dead leaves, dipped in fungicide, wrapped in plastic and held in a cooler overnight.

On Tuesday, it's bundled with other flowers, loaded as cargo on a jet and flown overnight from Quito to Miami, where it is queued up on Wednesday morning for USDA inspection for bugs and fungus. Passing inspection, the rose is transported from the airport to a Miami distribution center of auctioneers, wholesalers and importers. From there it goes to other smaller distribution centers up and down the East Coast.

For the New York City area, it's nearly a 24-hour ride by truck on Thursday to New York's flower district or by air to West Coast distributors. On Friday afternoon the rose arrives at a retail florist or a grocery store, and by Saturday a typical customer spots it, judges it based on beauty, price and anticipated vase life, decides to buy it in an arrangement with other flowers and takes it home. The buyer is little aware of the paths the rose has taken to get to a flower vase on Mom's dining room table.

Such are the fascinating stories that Stewart weaves in describing the modern-day cut-flower business. She takes us on a tour of this industry from Latin America to California and to Holland as she follows the breeding, growing, and selling.

Cut flowers have become a global marketplace, one scarcely imagined by our mothers and grandmothers.

Happy Mother's Day.