Roses in New York

Roses in New York: South American stems and how to size the bouquet

Each January the US imports about 11 million roses a day, and roses in New York come from that same flow, via Miami. In this corner of the shop, choosing roses in New York comes down to stem length, flower type and the size of the bouquet, not the growing region. Those three choices, plus a sense of when the city's biggest rose weeks fall, are what this guide covers.

Two short weeks account for roughly half of the rose supply moving through the US each year, the run-up to Valentine's Day and to Mother's Day, and the city's own version of that calendar sits in the city's flower calendar and customs.

South American stems: where New York's roses are grown

Almost four-fifths of the cut flowers sold in the US arrive by air rather than off American farms. Colombia supplies more than sixty per cent of that import by value, counted across all cut flowers rather than roses alone. Ecuador adds roughly a quarter, and between the two, they set what a New York florist actually has on the bench. Nine in ten of those imported stems clear customs through Miami, and refrigerated trucks then carry them on, roughly 1,300 miles north to the city. Kenyan roses, the stem a London florist reaches for, don't travel this route: a rose bought here is Andean, grown in Colombia or Ecuador rather than East Africa. JFLOO buys the flowers for that order only after payment comes through.

The longest stems in the trade come out of Ecuador, where farms sit in the Andes at around 2,800 to 3,000 metres above sea level. At that altitude a single rose can run from seventy centimetres to well over a metre, which is the whole reason a height-sorted list is worth opening rather than guessing from a photo. A name such as 19 White Ecuadorian Roses tells you the origin before the box is even opened, a shortcut worth using whenever length matters more than shade. A French rose isn't a separate variety at all. A florist simply bends back the outer petals of an ordinary rose by hand until the head sits wide open, one of the choices laid out among French and peony-style roses. Where a single colour feels too plain for the occasion, mixed rose bouquets bring several shades into the one wrap instead.

In 2022, roses made up 83 per cent of the flowers Americans bought for Valentine's Day, and 65 per cent of those stems were red. Red dominates that Valentine's Day split, which says more about an American rose order than any growing region does. A plain dozen is the everyday choice here, since the city sits outside the odd-for-living, even-for-mourning counting some Eastern European and Russian-speaking households still keep. Beyond a dozen, sizing stretches from a handful of stems up to bouquets built well past arm's length for a larger gesture. Colour carries its own loose meaning rather than a fixed rule: red reads as passion, pink as something gentler, white as plain simplicity, and none of it is written down anywhere official.

Rose delivery in New York: shade and stems checked on a photo

JFLOO's florist photographs the finished bouquet before the courier sets off, and that photo is where the shade and the stem count get checked rather than guessed from the listing. If something needs adjusting, or a particular rose has run out, the stand-in is close in both colour and price, and the swap shows up on that same photo. Most orders go out on the day they're placed, with the actual window shown on the bouquet's own card rather than promised in advance. Delivery is free in the centre, and areas outside the centre carry a flat zone fee set out on the delivery zones page; a card message costs nothing either way.

Choosing often comes down to length or number before anything else. Long stems are easiest to track down once roses sorted by stem height narrows the list, a plain dozen sits a click away through a set number of stems, and a bigger gesture has its own shelf in giant rose bouquets.