A Career in Bloom
Just for today, don’t take your usual route through Grand Central Market, downtown’s warren of stalls displaying the bread, butter and burritos of daily life.
Go past the tortilleria and the shop selling as many different kinds of chiles as you have fingers and toes. Make a right at the stand selling ripe mangoes the size of a giant’s fist and keep going until you find the flower of the market, Claudia Martinez.
You can’t miss her. She’s surrounded by the colors of happiness and love, of friendship and even death. Martinez is sorting through them now, reaching into a refrigerated case brimming with roses from Colombia and Ecuador. She plucks out different stems, explaining the age-old messages they send to lucky recipients.
“Red means love, courage and passion, and white means purity, sincerity, sympathy,” Martinez instructs. “Pink with yellow means friendship, the feeling between a mother and daughter or between sisters.
“But my favorites are the white roses. They’re very delicate, and they have a beautiful fragrance. They’re not easy to find. Some people prefer orchids, but not me.”
At age 24, Martinez feels as if she has gone to heaven. She owns a flower shop with her partner, Javier Cardenas, which keeps her at the busy market six days a week.
“When the market OKd our lease application [six months ago], it was my dream come true,” Martinez says.
There are flowers all over the La Crescenta home she shares with an aunt and uncle, and daisy patterns decorate the lace top she wears beneath her florist’s apron. When Halloween comes, she’ll masquerade as Mother Nature in a dress adorned with flowers, and dried blooms scattered through her hair. On Valentine’s Day, the Super Bowl Sunday of the flower business, she’ll serve her long line of customers wearing a crown of red roses.
“She has a very natural talent with flowers,” says Cardenas, 31, a word processor for Deutschebank who handles the business side of the business and the shop on weekends.
“I have it in my blood,” says the Acapulco-born Martinez. “But if someone had told me a long time ago that I’d be a floral designer, I’d never have believed it.”
Martinez did discover her calling serendipitously. When she was a 16-year-old student at Franklin Senior High School in Los Angeles, she happened by a Monterey Park floral shop and found herself staring at the bouquets in the window. Staring back was the proprietor, who invited Martinez in to try her hand at flower arranging.
“He said, ‘I think you have the personality to sell flowers,’ and he gave me a test. He said, ‘OK, choose any flowers and put them together.’ It was so simple. I took baby’s breath, greens, daisies and bride’s branches, which are dark gold. He liked my taste, so he invited me to work with him after school.”
When Martinez finished high school two years later, Lolo the proprietor asked her to run one of his two shops.
“I said I felt I needed more experience, because I was too young to take on such a big responsibility. He said he’d help me, but he also said he trusted me and was behind me. Without him, I might never have discovered my talent.”
A year later, Lolo closed both shops and returned to Mexico to look after his sick mother. Martinez moved on to various flower shops around downtown. A year and a half ago, she landed at a florist shop in Grand Central Market. And when that owner retired the following year, Martinez called on her friend with business savvy, Cardenas, to help her come up with $6,000 to take over the lease.
These days, Martinez rises while it’s still dark so she can pick up her orders at the downtown flower market at 6 a.m. Twelve hours later, she’ll close the stall after a long day of selling carnations, alstroemeria and irises to nearby office workers, neighborhood Latinos and visitors from Chinatown.
“I don’t know much about flowers, but they were really great at explaining the colors and styles,” says La Shawn Witt, who hired Martinez and Cardenas to create the flower girl’s basket and ushers’ boutonnieres for her father’s wedding this summer. “So I’m going to have them create weekly floral arrangements to complement my living room, because I love flowers and I don’t have a green thumb.”
Only now and then, Martinez will allow herself a break from the flower shop.
“A month ago, I took two days off and went to Catalina Island, where I stole some flowers from a beautiful garden because I really love them. If someone said to me, ‘You have to live without flowers,’ I’d say no. It’s something that I love--whether they’re dried flowers or plants or white roses, it’s all OK with me.”
Irene Lacher can be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com.
