Easter Lily Rush Catches Growers in Short Supply

If you were planning to decorate your Easter table with fragrant Easter lilies, you should have grown your own.

Growers and nurseries around the county are reporting an Easter lily shortage.

“This Easter caught a lot of us by surprise,” said Scott Carlson, co-owner of Florabundance, a shipper and wholesaler to Ventura County florists. “Last Easter was a lot softer, but this one is very strong.”

Not many people grow Easter lilies in Ventura County or the Central Coast because its market appeal is so seasonal, growers say.

“It’s a perennial, like poinsettias,” said Samuel Kim, owner of a Santa Rosa Valley nursery. “After Christmas, what are you going to do with them? It’s a risky business; you’ve got to make the right judgment.”

He knows of what he speaks. Kim grew only about 1,300 pots of lilies after his usual 1,500-plant inventory failed to sell well last year. “But I could have easily sold all 1,500 with this kind of demand,” he said. “I could have sold 2,000 this year.” Next year, he says, he’ll return to his old quota.

Many cut-flower wholesalers import their Easter lilies from Holland or Israel. It’s more expensive to buy imported flowers, but that hasn’t cut into demand, growers and wholesalers say.

Supermarkets are by far the biggest buyers of both cut and potted Easter lilies, and in the last decade they have stolen the market away from smaller florists.

“People would rather drop in and buy their plants where it’s more convenient,” said Jane Rees, manager of West Flora, a flower importer in Oxnard.

And some suspect that it is precisely that dominance that helped skew the market last year.

A strike by a large Northern California supermarket grocery chain cut demand statewide, leaving large growers like Milgro in Oxnard with a surplus.

“[That] flooded our market,” said Lorin Maygren, marketing director of Milgro. The local growers cut back, and now demand has greatly exceeded supply. Milgro produces between 150,000 and 200,000 pots of Easter lilies each season. “And this year we weren’t able to deliver to meet the demand,” Maygren said.