Where do your wedding flowers come from and how do you get them?
November 24th, 2008 Posted in Flower Themes, Wedding Planning and Ideas
Beautiful and Unique, your wedding flowers sure are different than the flowers our mothers and grandmothers carried down the aisle. As a flower expert, I have had the pleasure of walking flower farms all over the world. I have seen the utmost cutting edge technology equipped flower farms, to smaller flower farms run by local women groups. The process on how flowers get from overseas all the way to your hands to carry down your wedding aisle is amazing.
I want to share this process with you, let us start at one of our rose farm in Cayambe, Ecuador. At 6am everyday, the farm workers start cutting roses from the rose bushes. Each day they harvest hundreds of thousand roses walking up and down rows of commercially grown rose bush rows. Once a rose is cut, it is immediately put in a bucket of water which has a mix of sugars and carbohydrates. The best way to understand hydration of flowers is consider when a marathon runner prepares for her big race, the night before she eats pasta and drinks lots of sports drink. In flowers, we do the same thing, as soon as we cut a flower from the mother plant, we have to prepare the flower for a ‘marathon’ of a trip to get to your wedding.
Within 30 minutes, the cut rose is transported to a pre cooling room. In this room the rose will stay for up to 4 hours before going to the classifying room. At the classifying room, there are many stations and quality tests that each rose will have to pass in order for export. Flowers are categorized according to stem length, bloom cut point, size of flower bloom and many other rigid standards; If flowers fails, they are not usable for export; therefore it is discarded of.
After passing quality inspection, roses are then bunched and go back into a ‘gatorade’ solution water and shipped off to a cold room to spend the night preparing for its journey.
The following morning, our packers receive your bulk rose order. Very carefully, our packer will select the bunches of roses for your order and pack them in a box ~ labeled especially for you. At noon, one of our refrigerator trucks transports your box of wedding flowers along with several other boxes to the FedEx Quito coolers 3 hours away. In the evening, FedEx loads their plane and the flowers begin their journey to your doorstep. The plane takes a day to arrive to Miami, FL. In Miami, United States Agriculture Department inspects the shipment of flowers and when your box has cleared customs, the flowers will be transported via a refrigerated FedEx truck to Memphis. The following day, FedEx arrives at your doorstep with your bulk wedding roses.
This whole process sounds intimidating and quite frankly, if I didn’t have the experience I have, I would think twice about getting my roses direct at wholesale prices. However, I do see how amazingly efficient this process is and each week I see this process repeat itself hundreds of thousands of times. What is most amazing about this is that your wedding roses are so fresh because it is shipped directly to you instead of the following the traditional flower distribution chain, they will last days to weeks longer.