The Flowers and the Timing Are Exquisite

The flowers have left the building.

The lilies had been planted the week after Labor Day in this foggy coastal town not far from the Oregon border. They grew 3 feet high in six long rows of matching black crates in the second bay of Greenhouse 98, where computers regulated their sunlight, their water, their fertilizer and their temperature for their total comfort.

In the days before Christmas, 12,000 lilies -- timed perfectly to the verge of turning pink or white or yellow -- were cut and sent on a 48-hour journey by refrigerated truck to Pasadena, where they begin arriving today.

On New Year’s Day, the flowers will slowly, beautifully, dramatically -- but unmistakably -- die, even as they show off their colors for the viewing pleasure of millions.

“To make the cut flower do what it’s supposed to, the timing, the cutting, the soil, the light -- everything must be very precise,” says Bruce Brady, sales and marketing director for Sun Valley Floral Farms. “It’s a high-pressure deal. If we miss by even a day or two, we can be in a world of trouble.”

The 670-mile journey of the lilies, blue irises and pink French tulips -- from the sprawling greenhouses here to Colorado Boulevard -- is now one of the rarest and shortest trips any flowers make to the parade. The grower, Sun Valley, is one of the last domestic producers of flowers for the parade.

As domestic rose production has declined over the last decade -- from 52% of the U.S. market to 22% -- the Rose Parade has turned to overseas growers, mainly in Colombia and Ecuador, to fill its needs.

Flowers from South America are cheaper and more available in the winter. And many California growers are reluctant to grow for the Rose Parade, preferring to focus on the more profitable bonanza of Valentine’s Day.

“You could not pick a worse time of year for a massive floral parade” in the Northern Hemisphere, says Greg Lewis. “I would suggest they move it to Aug. 15.”

Lewis, a Pacific Palisades flower broker, is the man in the middle, buying blooms from growers like Sun Valley and selling them to the float builders.

He is the first person that one of the major float builders, Fiesta Parade Floats, calls in the summer, when its floral director begins ordering flowers. Trained in the Netherlands, Lewis comes from a family of Boston florists. He is so busy during the holidays -- the Rose Parade is 20% of his business -- that his family leaves town without him.

Lewis in turn calls dozens of flower farms, attempting to assemble 100,000 stems of a particular flower in purchases of as few as 300 stems at a time.

Lewis’ bills are often so long and complicated that it takes him a month after the parade just to total them up. As a result, float builders -- always nervous about flower costs, their second-highest expense after labor -- sometimes don’t know whether they have made a profit on a parade until February.

The cost of flowers runs into the tens of thousands of dollars for a large float.

Lewis works with farms ranging from South America to Israel and Indonesia for the balance of the flowers he orders.

He turns to Sun Valley Floral for more expensive, high-quality specialty items -- particularly blue irises. (Blue is the most difficult color to incorporate into a Rose Parade float because it is the rarest.)

Lewis also uses Sun Valley as a last-minute outlet when overseas flowers don’t come through, a too-frequent occurrence in an international supply chain that has been interrupted by bad weather, volcanic eruptions, civil wars, airline strikes and the occasional punitive tariff.

“We always tease Greg -- and he’s easy to tease because he gets so worked up -- by asking him, ‘What’s your excuse going to be this year?’ ” says Beverly Stansbury, administrator at Fiesta Parade Floats.

As a broker, Lewis is literally caught between float builder and floral farm. He and Sun Valley prefer to get orders six months early, allowing for the planting of rare varieties to produce specific colors. But the float builders often let their orders slide deep into the fall.

“If the float people would plan better,” says Brady, “we can manipulate the flowers and give them a more specific price they can plan around.

“With time, we can fulfill more of their needs.”

Sun Valley Floral Farms consists of dozens of huge greenhouses and warehouses resting on 400-plus acres in Arcata, an old logging town squeezed between the Pacific Coast Range and Humboldt Bay.

An Oregon agricultural professor brought the company here in 1964, drawn by the same moderate climate -- winter nights in the 40s, summer days topping out in the 60s -- that helps the region’s redwoods grow.

In 1974, a local scientist hybridized an Oriental lily called the Stargazer. It remains Sun Valley’s signature flower.

Ten years later, the farm’s Dutch-born general manager, Lane DeVries, built its first greenhouse. He bought the company with two partners in 1991 and continued modernizing.

Sun Valley Floral now boasts 2.4 million square feet of greenhouse space and four production facilities on the West Coast.

That capacity allows Sun Valley to grow a wide variety of flowers year-round -- making it particularly attractive for Pasadena’s big Jan. 1 floral parade.

“It’s not Valentine’s Day, but it’s a huge seasonal event with an impact on the market,” Brady says.

“There’s also a prestige involved with it. And when someone comes in with a 10,000-stem-or-more order of anything, let me tell you: I’m smiling.”

The bulbs that become Rose Parade flowers are supplied by Sun Valley’s Dutch sister company, which produces them either in Europe or the Southern Hemisphere.

When they arrive, they are placed in black plastic crates that have been carefully sterilized to prevent disease. The crates -- 20 inches long, a foot wide and 4 inches tall -- are placed in refrigerators the size of a gymnasium until the bulbs are ready for planting.

The timing of that planting is keyed to the parade.

To grow, the crates of flowers at Sun Valley are laid out in long, symmetrical rows inside the greenhouses.

The treasured blue irises are an exception. They stay outside in open-ended plastic tents, in part because the wind rustling through seems to make the flowers stronger.

The rows are planted on particular dates and are arranged chronologically. To walk through a Sun Valley greenhouse is to peer through a slow-motion camera, each line of flowers a little bit further along than the next.

Tulips will reach maturity in about four weeks. Irises need 12 to 14 weeks, lilies up to four months.

The flowers are picked just before Christmas by workers who typically make $10 to $12 per hour, plus free flowers twice a week. They are held in refrigerators before being loaded on refrigerated trucks on Dec. 23 and 24. After a stop at a Sun Valley facility in Oxnard, the flowers arrive in Pasadena each year on the morning of Dec. 26.

As Brady ate a seafood lunch on Humboldt Bay a few weeks ago, Lewis called to discuss the blue irises. Like any blue flower, they are a sensitive subject. With several floats taking patriotic themes, float builders need a blue suitable for the American flag. Besides irises (and sometimes statice), builders seeking blue have few good options.

Lewis wanted to make sure that the irises would be light blue, rather than the more typical purplish blue.

“We don’t have it,” Brady said.

He explained to the broker that the light blue variety doesn’t grow well at this time of year. Maybe if Sun Valley had had six months notice, it could have produced the desired flower. But not now.

“As technologically advanced as this business is now,” Brady says, “we still have to deal with the laws of nature.”