A VALENTINE ROSE : The journey from a greenhouse in Santa Barbara to a Westwood doorstep is a labor of love.
In mid-December, one tiny Cara Mia rose bud began inching up toward the sunlight in Groen Rose Co.’s steamy, six-acre greenhouse. Thriving on a steady diet of fertilized water and carbon dioxide, the velvety, scarlet rose grew to 28 inches tall, along with millions of other roses nurtured near the Pacific Ocean in Santa Barbara.
Last Thursday morning the pampering ended, and the rose joined the 50 million others expected to find their way to lovers for Valentine’s Day. Within 27 hours of being snipped from its roots, this particular deep red rose was sorted, bundled and trucked to Los Angeles before finding its way to Kathy Zamarin’s doorstep in Westwood.
Its journey began at 8 a.m. Thursday morning, when a Groen greenhouse worker clipped the rose, plunged it into a bucket of water and sent it to a cooler for chilling. By 7 p.m., the Cara Mia, which means “my dearest” in Italian, was tightly wrapped in paper and tied with string in a standard bunch with 24 other roses.
Nestled in buckets of cold water, 53,000 roses were delivered late Friday to Groen’s stall in the downtown Los Angeles Flower Market.
At 4:30 a.m. Friday, Robb Friedline, manager of P.J.’s Flowers & Gifts in Westwood, arrived to collect 35 bunches of roses, paying about $28 a bunch for the long-stemmed Cara Mias.
At 10 a.m., Friedline arranged 12 Cara Mias in a glass vase, adding green leather fern, argonia and tiny, lavender wax flowers. He attached a card saying: “Happy Valentine’s Day, Love, Bob,” to a red, plastic Valentine’s heart.
At 10:30 a.m., P.J.’s delivery man Mike Petersen rang Zamarin’s doorbell.
“Oh, he did it--how wonderful!” said Zamarin. “I feel I’m a lucky lady.” Bob Snyder, a home remodeler who has been Zamarin’s boyfriend for the past four years, paid P.J.’s $50 for the early Valentine’s Day bouquet--the first of many holiday orders that the shop will fill by late Tuesday.
“The last time I received a dozen red roses was 20 years ago when my ex-husband bought a new Buick and the dealer gave the wives roses,” said Zamarin with a laugh.
According to Roses Inc., a Haslett, Mich., trade organization, Valentine’s Day is the No. 1 rose-giving holiday. About 75% of the roses purchased on Valentine’s Day are red, with the 28- to 34-inch, long-stemmed “fancy” or “extra-fancy” grades most in demand.
In 1989, U.S. growers will ship about 800 million roses, according to Floral Index, a Chicago marketing firm. The roses are sold through 35,000 retail outlets and 25,000 supermarkets across the nation.
About half the nation’s 225 rose growers are in California, with the largest companies in Santa Barbara and San Diego counties.
Because roses are greenhouse crops, the recent freezing temperatures did not kill them. Still, holiday pressures and cold weather boosted wholesale prices to about $1 a stem, about twice what retail florists paid for long-stem roses in November, according to Groen’s Los Angeles market manager, Lori Anderson. Basically, that means a dozen roses selling for $30 to $50 a dozen today were purchased by retail florists for about $12 to $15 a dozen last week.
While Groen’s owners declined to say exactly how much it costs a grower to produce one rose, operating a year-round greenhouse for 160,000 rose plants is expensive, according to Paul Nielsen, manager of Groen’s greenhouse operations. “We have a huge investment in the heating and watering systems, the trucks and the workers,” said Nielsen. “Roses are not something you pick in the field.”
It takes about two dozen workers to nurture and process the six acres of flowers. In the past three months, Groen spent about $60,000 on natural gas to maintain a greenhouse temperature of about 85 degrees Fahrenheit.
To boost stem growth, Nielsen pumps extra carbon dioxide into the air. The expansive greenhouses are eerily quiet, the silence broken only by the sound of dripping water. “I don’t get emotional about roses,” said Nielsen, who formerly worked as a mechanical engineer for an aerospace firm. “They are a commodity. They could be nuts and bolts.”
After graduating from college and working a few years as an engineer, Nielsen said he was drawn back into the business by his father, who worked with Cornelius Groen, the Dutch-born founder. The Nielsens also own a percentage of the company.
Groen built his first greenhouses in Montebello around 1915. By 1948, urbanization forced him to seek more open spaces. So, greenhouse by greenhouse, Groen moved the operation to agricultural property overlooking the Pacific Ocean a few miles north of Santa Barbara.
Although nearly 200 varieties of greenhouse roses are available, Nielsen said Groen chooses to grow about 19, mostly “the meat and potato varieties.” The company produced 3.7 million stems of roses last year, cutting an average of 10,000 a day.
Roses are grown there year-round, and every day of the year some are cut for sale. Groen workers cut the roses, turn them upside down to prevent damage to their heads and carry them to the end of the long rows of bushes. At the end of each row stands a bucket of water and weak citric acid, which help the fresh-cut roses draw water. The stems are placed in the buckets.
Once the buckets are filled, a worker driving an electric cart collects the flowers and moves them into coolers kept at 34 degrees Fahrenheit. All day Thursday, Groen workers cut, trimmed, sorted, stacked and wrapped 177 buckets of roses. Each bucket holds about 300 stems. Most flower shops tripled their regular orders for Valentine’s Day.
The roses and a variety of other plants and flowers were trucked to the downtown Los Angeles Flower Market where Anderson, Groen’s granddaughter, and her assistants began the wet and arduous task of sorting, stacking and wrapping orders for about 50 retail florists.
Within moments, Anderson’s red sweat shirt and sneakers were soaking wet and her hands were smudged with black ink from the newspapers used to wrap the orders.
“They all seem to want the long-stem roses,” said Anderson.
Unlike other growers who ship products out of state, Groen sells everything it grows in Southern California. Each year, Anderson said, Groen sells about $1 million in roses and other flowers and plants.
“I don’t think I would take on something like this if it wasn’t a family business,” Anderson said in a previous interview.
She was enrolled in a management training program at a savings and loan when her mother asked her to take over the job at the Flower Market. She agreed. “I grew up in the flower business and had fond memories.”
As the mother of a teen-age son and an 11-year-old daughter, Anderson’s upside-down schedule has been a challenge. Most mornings, she leaves her husband Mike and children in Whittier around 2:30 a.m. She and half a dozen employees wait on customers until about 8 a.m. When she leaves the market, Anderson still has orders, paper work and deliveries to contend with.
“You kind of lose track of time,” she said. “You are eating lunch or dinner in here and it’s 4 o’clock in the morning.”
