Washington - On a table in her 1820 stone farmhouse in Waterford, Virginia, floral designer Holly Heider Chapple is reinventing the Valentine’s Day bouquet.
Amid a soft confection of fern-like plumosa, blue-green seeded eucalyptus and wands of white veronica blooms, a dozen plump roses repose luxuriantly.
The blooms Chapple has chosen have a name, Miranda, and sorry, Cupid, they are a shell pink, not red. They bear scant resemblance to the tightly wound rosebuds on a stick that have come to symbolise the Valentine’s rose.
Instead they look as if they are from an English cottage garden – open, swirling with petals and as sweetly-scented as grandma’s cologne. “I just can’t bring myself to use a standard rose any more,” Chapple said.
“Flowers are supposed to look as if they come from the garden. Standard roses look as if they were made on a production line.”
Whether such an arrangement will become the future of the holiday bouquet is up in the air – these roses are neither cheap, nor easy to find. So far, they have found a home chiefly in the wedding market. But one thing is certain: the business of getting roses to consumers has altered radically since Chapple became a floral designer 23 years ago.
Cut flowers are available at every grocery store and from city street vendors, and there are far fewer florists. In 2005, there were more than 21 000 florist establishments in the US, according to the Census Bureau.
As of 2013, the number had wilted to 14 000.
Part of the reduction is attributable to florists consolidating locations, but many have simply gone out of business, unable to compete with the economies of scale of large supermarket chains, to weather the Great Recession or the incursions of e-commerce.
“The ones that have survived have tended to be the lean, mean professionals who really know what they’re doing,” said Bruce Wright, editor of the trade publication Flowers&. In other words, those who offer great service and sophisticated designs that go well beyond the clichéd dozen long-stemmed red roses gathered with baby’s breath and leatherleaf fern.
And if Valentine’s Day was once limited to guys buying flowers for sweethearts, that’s no longer the case. “Women buying for men has increased a lot,” Wright said.
“There are also more people buying Valentine’s gifts that aren’t romantic, people who buy for best friends, fathers buying for daughters.”
Whatever the intended sentiment, you will be paying a premium for roses this week.
At every step in the line of distribution, companies must hire extra staff and equipment to move the roses and other Valentine’s vegetation, said Christine Boldt of the Association of Floral Importers of Florida.
Independent floral designers such as Chapple, devote much of their business to weddings, corporate accounts and special events. Fuelled by the spread of images on Pinterest, Instagram and other social media, the wedding trade has gone crazy for Miranda and other varieties of so-called garden roses. Chapple and others see no reason why they shouldn’t be used more for Valentine’s arrangements, if the client’s pockets are deep enough.
The name is something of a misnomer: while these garden rose varieties evoke antique noisettes and china roses draped over garden bowers, they are bred primarily for their cut-flower qualities, with strong stems, reliable repeat flowering in the field and durability after cutting.
The hottest garden roses come from a breeder in England named David Austin. Now almost 90, he established David Austin Roses in 1970 with the intention of bestowing real garden roses – that is, rosebushes – with the qualities of antique roses but with the vigour and repeat blooming of modern roses.
With his son, David jr, he later turned to developing cut roses with the same qualities.
“Some people have a crush on Brad Pitt,” Chapple said. “I think I would pass out if I met David Austin or David Austin jr. I love them.”
In an interview, David Austin jr said he and his father believed the rose had taken “a bit of a wrong turn. It was about a closed, static flower”, he said.
Even without considering the scent, or lack of it, the tightly furled, high-centred hybrid tea had lost the natural beauty and romance of the antique roses.
Valentine’s roses don’t have to be red either – Martha Stewart Living’s February issue features a bouquet of “sorbet-hued” David Austin roses for Valentine’s Day that would probably cost $500 (R8 000).
In an arrangement, the roses cost as much as $15 (R240) a stem.
To the broader world, garden roses remain something of a secret. David Austin jr would like them to be used more at Valentine’s, but hybrid teas still dominate. “We are a little noise in a huge, bustling market stall at the moment, but we’ll continue to make people aware of what we’re doing,” he said.
The company is adding two varieties to the collection next year and has four more in the pipeline.
The shift in floral retailing and the mass production of roses in Latin America have made the rose available to all, even if the consumer hasn’t focused on the different forms and grades that are out there. Chapple believes abundant, inexpensive roses have weakened this token of love. “It’s going to take a lot of work to make the general public see flowers the way we do,” she said.
“The brides are already there.”
Washington Post