Roses in Dublin

Roses in Dublin: when they are Irish and how to choose a bouquet

Roses in Dublin are Irish-grown only in summer and autumn, cut by members of Flower Farmers of Ireland, a collective that includes growers in County Dublin. For the rest of the year a rose in a Dublin bouquet has almost certainly come through the Netherlands, so the useful starting point for choosing one is not the country it grew in. It is what you know about the person who will receive it: how many stems, how tall, which kind.

Irish-grown in summer and autumn, auction-bought the rest of the year

Ireland buys most of its cut flowers from abroad, and homegrown stems make up only a small part of the market. Flower Farmers of Ireland now counts more than a hundred members, County Dublin growers among them, and their roses reach the market in summer and autumn, when the Irish season allows it.

Outside those months the trade runs mainly through the Netherlands, topped up by flowers from Kenya, Colombia, Ecuador and the UK. The flower stalls on Grafton Street buy from Dutch auctions as well: stems bought there travel overnight by lorry to a wholesale depot before reaching the street the next morning. The catalogue's Ecuadorian and Dutch roses, sold as 19 White Ecuadorian Roses and 25 Dutch White Roses, are imported rather than Irish-grown. JFLOO buys the flowers for an order only after it has been paid for, so a bouquet is never put together before someone has asked for it.

Family-run stalls on the corners of Chatham, Harry and Duke Streets have sold roses since the 1940s, and taking one home means lifting it straight out of the bucket. Ordering from JFLOO works the other way round: the bouquet is specified first, and the roses are bought to match it afterwards.

What can be set in advance is stem count, colour, height and the kind of rose; the roses by type page sorts French roses from spray roses and the rest, and the shape of the finished bouquet follows from there. A French rose is not a variety but a florist's technique: the outer petals are turned back by hand to open the bloom wider, as on 11 Red French Roses. The same idea appears on a larger bud in 15 French Roses "Jumilia", white at the base and pink along the edge of each petal.

That is how rose delivery in Dublin works at JFLOO for every size of order: the florist photographs the finished bouquet before a courier leaves, and that photo is the moment to ask for any change. Most orders go out on the day they are placed, and the zones they cover are set out on the delivery page.

Hyacinths in spring, lisianthus all year: roses that share a bouquet

In Dublin's mixed bouquets, roses usually stand next to lisianthus, a greenhouse eustoma available all year, or next to hyacinths, a spring bulb flower that appears in the catalogue for only a few months each spring. The rose supplies the colour that stays constant; the second flower is the one that changes with the season.

Roses here come wrapped either in designer paper or in a coffee-style sleeve, and what a wet dash across the city does to a wrapped bouquet is covered on the flowers in Dublin page. Once indoors, the one job worth doing straight away is cutting the stems again, at an angle.