L.A.’s Flower Market--A Brilliant Nighttime World : Lilies of the Field Do Not Toil but Moving Them From the Bowers of the Country to Bowels of the City Is Work

In the young part of the day, when the clock insists that it is morning but the night is still firmly in place, the light from within the Los Angeles Flower Market--a brilliant, blue-white light--pushes out into the adjoining dark streets like a false sun.

The smells, however, are real, if not native. The countryside scent of fragrant blossoms drifts out of the market and down the sidewalks of Wall Street between 7th and 8th streets, in a part of downtown Los Angeles that usually smells of spilled rotgut wine.

The lilies of the field do not toil, neither do they spin, the Bible says. But if they are to grace dining room tables or bridal bouquets, someone must work to put them there.

And so they do. For six decades, here at the Los Angeles flower mart, the floral harvest from the bowers of the countryside has been trucked into the bowels of the city, millions of blooms each week.

And for six decades, many of the same families have worked here, European immigrants many of them, who took to the hard work in which a box of roses, however lovely the contents, is still heavy. They also took to the odd hours that require a man to go to bed before his children and rise at midnight.

‘Hard for All of Us’

These days, in a market more than twice as big as the original, their children and grandchildren work the same small hours of the day.

Johnny Mellano used to come here with his father, whose picture hangs on the wall of the loft office of Mellano and Co. The year of the photo is uncertain; the time is frozen by the clock in the picture--3:27 a.m.

Mellano, born on his family’s daffodil farm in Cerritos, keeps almost the same hours today. “It’s hard for all of us,” he said. “The whole world works on a different schedule.”

Mellano also is treasurer and general manager for the flower market, overseeing the Southern California Flower Market on the west side of Wall Street and the Los Angeles Flower Market on the east side, about 100 wholesale vendors in all.

Mellano, like John Prechtele, his general manager, whose grandfather helped to found this place, learned his trade on the job. Mellano, like dozens of others, can tell San Diego carnations from South American at a glance, foreign freesias from domestic.

“You can walk through the market (and say) ‘I don’t want those carnations; they’re no good.’ You can’t explain right away why they’re no good, but you know,” Mellano said.

He squeezed a handful of iris stems. “Spongy. No water for a week. You put them in water and they’d open like that,” he said, snapping his fingers. He rustled a bunch of mini-gladiolas, frilled white blooms with dark rose throats. “Hear that? That’s crisp, a crisper sound. They had water after those iris did.”

The result of all that labor is seen on street vendors’ carts, in florists’ windows, on the tables of pricier cafes. The labor itself is hidden away here, in one of the less savory quarters of town, where the market’s light and color during the drab hours of the night draw insomniac tourists, local artists, some street people from the grimy, shuttered streets. “We get every kind of weirdo around here,” one vendor said.

Flower market days begin about midnight. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the trucks rumble in from the growers’ fields, bringing brushy purple stalks of liatrus--the only flower that blooms from the top down--from San Diego County; sunrise-hued snapdragons from Oxnard and Carpinteria, and roses from Salinas or Watsonville.

The cold, waxy boxes, big as coffins, start to pile up. Some of them go to other cities, perhaps Santa Barbara or Las Vegas. Others stay and are unpacked hastily.

California’s dozens of flower varieties, from humble daisies to frail and fragrant lilies of the valley ($13.50 wholesale for a few stems, with at least a 3 to 1 retail markup) are shelved or nestled in tubs of water alongside the imports--wax flowers from Australia, freesias from Holland, chrysanthemums from South America.

“Years ago you had your seasons. Certain products would come along, people would come in early to get it,” Mellano said. “The world is small today. We bring stuff from all over the world. You can get almost anything any time if you’re willing to pay the price.”

Although international competition stimulates American ingenuity, Mellano thinks, he noted that it is costly. American flowers going to Europe are assessed a 22% tariff on their price and air fare, he said. European flowers shipped here are assessed a 7% tariff on just the price of the blooms. Dendrobium orchids, carefully cultivated here, grow wild in Thailand. There is little hope of change. “Flowers are not a big deal politically,” Mellano said.

Tumble of Color

It is not international trade that comes to mind, however, in a stroll through the market. It is the riotous tumble of color and shape: exotic proteas like an orange explosion of fireworks, and proteas like pastel artichokes; kangaroo paws--black furry stems with pale green blooms; nerine lilies, their fuchsia flowers bobbing together on a single stem like gossips trading secrets; bags of beheaded carnations, $3 for four dozen, for wreaths or corsages; lunarias, the parchment-like silver dollars on branches; prism-tinted orchids, like a flight of birds; sturdy zinnias in Crayola colors; violet water lilies, big as cabbages, drops of wax keeping the petals open; bachelor’s buttons stacked waist-high; orchids veined like stained glass; stemmed pineapples the size of gumballs; Hawaiian heliconia, $8 each, leathery flowers dangling from a yard-high branch.

Even the trash is beautiful: crumpled magenta orchids, mashed rose petals.

For those who work here, it is less a romp through the world’s flower garden than rough-and- tumble wrangling in a commodities exchange pit. For certain holidays, flower market habitues say, when the rest of the world is celebrating world peace or mother love, flower buyers here can get desperate, once in a while swiping carts or quarreling over some scarce roses.

And it is always some holiday here. In June, they are planning Christmas. In September, they fret over Valentine’s Day. On the sultriest afternoon in August, the windows of the florist supply shops that flank the market are full of jolly Santa statuettes and frosty wreaths of holly.

‘Always . . . Ahead’

“You’re like the fashion industry--always a couple of seasons ahead,” said florist Bob French, who operates California Floral Co. and, three days a week, walks through here in a spiffy business suit to select the day’s purchases.

Before retailers arrive, the growers and wholesalers do business, often making “lateral” buys, wholesaler to wholesaler.

The gentlemen of Sakai Floral Co.--Harry Sakai, 64, and his son, Dennis Sakai, 32, are here by 2 a.m. three days a week and, like most dealers, are on the way home to Carpinteria by 9 a.m.

The elder Sakai, who studied horticulture in Japan, uses an abacus to calculate his trade, flicking the wooden markers back and forth faster than his son’s calculator can tally. “He double checks my calculator,” his son joked.

Many of the Sakais’ flowers are sold on standing orders even before they arrive. The others, carnations, snapdragons, airy alstromeria, go fast.

After the wholesale rush, there is a lull. To fill it, “more coffee is drunk here than anywhere in the world,” Mellano said. It is the scent of strong coffee that the dealers notice, not the sweet Lavande roses or the spicy stock. “People who work in this business don’t smell the flowers. You get used to them,” Mellano said.

Late at 5:30 a.m.

By 5 a.m., retail florists arrive to select their wares, people like Judy Kaplan, who stocks her Santa Monica shop, Flowers on Ashford, from the bundles she can fit into her little white van. On Mondays, slow days compared to fiercely competitive Fridays, she takes her time and arrives late--at 5:30 a.m.

The retailers stroll through the market, making their selections. They tend to be loyal to certain growers--”like a grocery store. Once you get used to going to one place, you don’t look around much,” French said.

The florists are careful shoppers with practiced eyes. One morning, French--with an all but imperceptible gesture that declines a sale without being rude--turned down birds of paradise at five for $5. A few aisles over, Louis had them, 10 for $7. “I’ll take them all,” French said.

He has been doing this for 30 years, since before he was in college, where he realized his error in studying “boring” engineering and returned to floristry.

Flower buying is an art of anticipating tastes. Mellano, for example, used to sell 5,000 bunches a day of delicate maidenhair fern; now, it is only 100 bunches a week.

“You’re just trying to put yourself in the customer’s position, to watch and see what the customer wants,” French said.

No Place for Neophytes

A day’s purchase may include 100 dozen roses, potted plants and some exotica like red Australian wattles. The purchases are wrapped in yesterday’s newspapers and numbered with the buyers’ assigned number for later billing. Trailing the florists by an hour or so are their bearers, young men in T-shirts who sling bundles of orchids and haul sheaves of daffodils to the vans on the market roof.

This is not a place for the neophyte. People move briskly here, and the stock is too perishable to waste time on someone who doesn’t know the difference between a gerbera daisy and a rubrum lily. Occasional school field trip groups wander through. Secretaries come by on Mondays to stock office vases, and housewives come in for 9 a.m. leftovers on weekdays and Saturdays, although not all dealers will sell to private buyers, especially in a business where people take years to go from polite nods of the head every day to finally addressing one another by name.

Fred Chorna is an exception.

Chorna, a strictly wholesale novelty and candy dealer, knows everyone because he sees everyone from the best spot in the place, right at the entrance.

His candy items are inside, like a “get well” intravenous transfusion bottle filled with strawberry sweets and a chocolate-filled soda glass with a candy straw. But his novelty items outside are grabbers too, stuffed pandas big as coffee tables, a Bozo clown almost as tall as he and stuffed bears hugging a plush heart around a bud vase--such a big Valentine’s Day item a few years ago that he has ordered 2,000 dozen for this year.

Gift Baskets of Fruit

Chorna, son of a produce market manager, was in produce himself and packed gift baskets of fruit in his garage, delivering them door to door until his Ford Falcon broke down.

He has been here for nearly 14 years. Business is good. Everyone knows him, and retailers stop by, schmooze a bit, sample his orange pumpkin-shaped candies at 5 a.m., place an order for chewy Christmas sweets or seductive Valentine’s Day chocolates.

After so many years, he is used to the hours and the company, even enjoys them. Mornings like this, the darkness outside, the brightness inside, and Chorna’s open, mustachioed face somehow get people talking. “I’ve listened to a lot of stories,” he said. “But you don’t get emotionally involved. Once you do you’re in big trouble.”

As he spoke, a woman walked by, one of the myriad street people, shuffling slowly on gray sneakers with holes at the toes. Her gray hair was scraped back almost neatly, her coat was marginally clean. In both arms she held a bundle, wrapped in the Wall Street Journal: a small, bright bunch of marigolds, a gift from some wholesaler.

“Oh, her,” said Chorna. “She’s around here a lot. We give her a box of candy or some cookies to eat.”