Plants in Toronto: Ontario's greenhouse crop, chosen for a heated home
Ontario accounts for half of Canada's floriculture sales, and in Niagara's greenhouses, cut flowers take up only about five per cent of the growing space. Plants in Toronto come from a province built to grow pots, not stems. A gift plant here spends months behind glass with the heating on, chosen for that sill rather than for a single day.
Pots before stems: what Ontario's greenhouses grow
Ontario is Canada's largest floriculture province, with 50.5 per cent of national floriculture sales in 2022 and roughly 48 per cent of the country's flower greenhouse area in 2023. In Niagara, those greenhouses lean towards pots rather than cut stems: cut flowers took up only about five per cent of the growing area in 2021.
That balance shows in what's on offer here with plants in Toronto: flowering plants, cacti, potted plants sorted by type, and florariums, a succulent sealed or left open in a glass shape. A plant is bought to keep rather than to arrange, priced in months rather than days. A moth orchid in flower stays that way for two to three months, long after a cut bouquet would be gone.
Downtown January runs close to −0.3 °C by day and −6.7 °C after dark, with 115 to 120 centimetres of snow falling over the season. A moth orchid doesn't need long outdoors to suffer: the short walk from a door to a car and back is enough cold to mark the leaves. So it travels wrapped and gets handed to the recipient in person, never left on a step.
Indoors the trouble flips to dry heat. A condo or hotel room with the radiators running loses moisture fast, and a pot set directly above or beside one dries out faster than it should. A moth orchid actually wants an ordinary room: 19–30 °C by day, 16–19 °C at night, which most Toronto flats already give it without any adjusting.
Watering follows the plant, not the calendar: about once a week, less in winter, and never left standing in a saucer of water. The clear pot it comes in makes this easy to judge, since you can see through to the bark and tell whether it's still damp. Roots that are doing well show a silvery white.
A florarium on a Toronto sill: humid July, heated January
A succulent stores its own water, up to nine-tenths of its weight at times, because it comes from places where rain is rare and heat isn't. That's why an open florarium suits it better than a sealed one: the plant wants air moving past it, not a closed atmosphere holding the damp in. Watering is a mist from a spray bottle now and then, nothing heavier.
Toronto's July runs around 27 °C by day and 17–18 °C at night, with real humidity alongside the warmth. Keep the glass out of direct midday sun regardless of the season; past that, the open shape asks little else of the room. Winter heating dries the flat out, but an open florarium takes that in its stride, since the air it needs is already moving through, and it's no reason to water more often.
The shapes on offer run from a cube to a droplet, each holding a stone rose, sedum or haworthia; the Droplet Florarium with Succulent pairs the shape with the plant in one piece. Cacti ask for the same light, dry routine and sit well on the same sill.
A plant gift splits into two logics. One is the pot that stays for months: a flowering plant, a cactus, or something picked out by type for someone who already knows the look they want. The other is a single occasion wrapped as one parcel, an orchid paired with a gift in the same box, such as the Belgian Chocolate Orchid or Roses and Orchids in a Box.
Each plant is put together to order, and a photo goes to the sender before the courier leaves with it. Most orders reach the recipient the same day they're placed, and the exact window is shown on each plant's own page; the delivery page covers how it works in full. A hotel stay, an order placed from outside Canada, or a date such as Thanksgiving or Mother's Day all run the same way, covered on the flowers in Toronto page.
Choosing where to start among plants in Toronto is mostly about the light on the sill. Full sun suits flowering plants, a shaded spot in winter still works for florariums, and a precise pick by size or colour is easiest from plants by type.