The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Flower business is blooming
NORWALK — Betsy McNeil bent down to examine roses in a refrigerated case at Braach’s House of Flowers on Friday afternoon. The executive director of Norwalk Grassroots Tennis and Education, she wanted something sunny to honor a student’s mother at their Mother’s Day celebration that evening, and she was not sure what to choose.
Her dilemma was the very last hurdle the flowers had to clear before reaching their final destination — the hands of a smiling mother. To get there, they had been whisked around the globe by a far-flung team of farmers, wholesalers, customs workers and truck drivers. The blooms race both around the world and against the clock to travel from as far as New Zealand while staying fresh as, well, daisies.
It is an impressive feat any day of the year, but in the leadup to Mother’s Day — when the National Retail Federation estimates $2.6 billion will be spent on flowers in 2018 — the industry shifts into overdrive.
Braach’s buys fresh blooms by East Coast Wholesale Flowers, a company located three miles away in a warehouse sandwiched between artist studios and a Cross Fit, and it is there that you can get a glimpse of the madness. That is, you could if you were a retailer — the operation is closed to individuals. Instead, the wholesaler sells thousands of kinds of flowers to florists from New York to Rhode Island. The week leading up to Mother’s Day, it was all hands on deck.
“Mother’s Day beats out Valentine’s Day, by far,” said the wholesaler’s owner, Jamal Ansari. “Valentine’s Day is a one-hit wonder — nothing else happens in February,” he said. In May, Mother’s Day coincides with wedding, prom and bar mitzvah season, leading his volume to swell over 500 percent.
And in the space between a farm and your kitchen table, there is plenty room for misadventure. This week, volcanic eruptions in Hawaii delayed shipments of king protea, a flower surrounded by pink leaves arranged like the scales of an artichoke. One year, unusual weather meant no local peonies were ready in time for Mother’s Day, and Ansari had to order them from Holland — but as luck would have it, the Dutch peonies had bugs, which stopped them at customs.
“They were held, fumigated and released seven or eight days later,” Ansari said.
Needless to say, by the time they got to Norwalk, the peonies were in no shape for Mom.
Trucks can go off the road, losing entire shipments, or what’s known as the “cold chain” can be broken, leaving flowers in warm temperatures and dramatically shortening their lifespans. The flowers meant to fill an order for a wedding or a graduation can also brush with human conflict. In 2015, people escaping war in Syria and elsewhere tried to flee their refugee camp in France by rushing the underwater tunnel to England. Flowers destined for East Coast Wholesale Flowers were freer to travel the same path, but the resulting delays caused them to miss their flights to America.
But when all goes according to plan, refrigerated trucks filled with flowers from around the world await outside East Coast Wholesale Flowers before sunrise. Early in the morning, employees arrive to begin breaking down the shipment to send to florists throughout the region.
“California is over here,” said Norma Parr, who had been at the warehouse since 5:30 a.m.
The smell of heathers filled the air. Different trucks bring flowers from different parts of the world, and here employees busily cut open boxes of tinyblossomed wax flowers and honey myrtles resembling feathery pom poms.
Parr’s corner, by contrast, was filled with roses from Ecuador and Colombia, two of the world’s largest exporters for the flower. The roses were named things like “Moody Blue” and “Pink Floyd” and ranged in color from a classic red to the pale green of an apple’s flesh. Posters of roses hung on the wall, naming each permutation of color, size and petal shape— one advertised 16 types of whites and creams alone.
While the roses and domestic flowers had arrived for that day, some Dutch boxes had gotten held up by an accident in Europe; others had made it stateside, but were still working their way up Interstate 95 from John F. Kennedy International Airport. Those finally rolled up at 6:40 a.m. Without missing a beat, the wholesaler incorporated them into what Ansari describes as the “crazy ballet.” Forklifts carried boxes to the stations, and Parr called out how many of each flower had been sold to whom; they were sorted, wheeled into coolers and placed in water.
As Ansari directed employees and buyers busily shuttling flowers to and fro, he surveyed the walls of flowers packing his warehouse. If all went well, all of them — 23,000 Dutch tulips, 35,000 roses and countless others — would disappear by Mother’s Day.
“It’s a trick,” he said.