| Colombia | 177 million stems |
| Ecuador | 137 million stems |
| Guatemala | 4 million stems |
| Ethiopia | 2 million stems |
| Mexico | 1 million stems |
| Kenya | 0.4 million stems |
Geoffrey Chaucer’s 699-line Parliament of Fowls (1382) makes the first English-language link between flowers, romance, and Valentine’s Day. The relevant passage:
“I]n a launde, upon an hille of floures,
Was set this noble goddesse Nature;
Of braunches were hir halles and hir boures,
Y-wrought after hir craft and hir mesure;
Ne ther nas foul that cometh of engendrure,
That they ne were prest in hir presence,
To take hir doom and yeve hir audience.
For this was on seynt Valentynes day,
Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make.*
* “When every bird comes to choose his mate.”
Seven centuries later, the National Retail Federation guesses Americans will spend about $25.8 billion on Valentine gifts this year. A tenth of the money, $2.5 billion, goes to flowers. Before this evening’s candles light up, here’s a quick look at the four-step network of agriculture and farm labor, truckers and and pilots, policy professionals and front-line civil service workers, and small businesses that get the long-stemmed reds from tropical farms to florist storefront to you:
Growing and Picking: Worldwide flower trade totals about $10 billion annually. The Dutch are the top importers, with Americans second at about $2 billion per year. Colombia was last year’s top U.S. source at $1.1 billion, followed by Ecuador at $500 million. U.S. domestic floriculture, a $6.5 billion industry, supplies about a quarter of U.S. flowers, and centers more on garden and potted plants than cut stems.
By bloom type, 2.7 billion roses accounted for half the value of U.S. imports. Colombia provides about 1.5 billion stems, grown on about 8600 hectares of farmland near Bogota and harvested by about 100,000 rural workers. Next door Ecuador’s 1.0 billion are not far behind. The remaining 200 million roses arrive variously from Guatemala, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Kenya; among other flowers, Thailand is the top orchid source and Costa Rica places near the top in lilies.
Transport: Roses arrive year-round, but the large import pulses in late January/early February and late April/early May — just before Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day — include about half of annual deliveries. The short life of a blossom means that flower trade is mainly an air cargo business. Once picked and boxed, roses travel in chilled trucks from farms to El Dorado airport near Bogota and Mariscal Sucre in Ecuador, with most Valentine’s roses — about 90% — arriving at Miami International Airport via (according to USDA) 30-35 daily chartered wide-body flights. Likewise in early May, orchid farms around Bangkok connect via Tokyo to deliver most U.S. prom-night corsages.
Transit: Customs and Border Protection officers inspect the incoming flowers for phytosanitary health on arrival at Miami. CBP reports inspecting 1.23 billion flowers at the airport last year and intercepting 1,975 pests — mostly nursery-threatening thrips, moths, and caterpillars rather than customer-intimidating scorpions or tarantulas.
Policy: Though technically assigned a 6.5% tariff, most flowers arrive in the U.S. duty-free under free trade agreements and “preference” programs. The U.S.-Colombia FTA waives the tariff for roses (and chrysanthemums, lilies, etc), saving florists and their customers about $65 million a year. The African Growth and Opportunity does the same for Ethiopian and Kenyan blossoms. Florists buying Ecuadoran roses and Thai orchids, though, must wait for Congress to revive the Generalized System of Preferences to get the same benefit.
And last: Having landed at the airport about a week ago, flower shipments move by refrigerated truck or domestic cargo flight to wholesalers and warehouses. By Monday, they have reached the roughly 12,000 American florists (mostly small businesses, employing about 64,000 people this year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics); and from them to you.
So that’s the business side. Last word to Chaucer, also from the Parliament:
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, / The life so short, the art so hard to learn.
Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquering, / The attempt so hard, the conquest so sharp
The dredful Ioy, that alwey slit so yerne, / The fearful joy, that ever slips away so fast
Al this mene I by love. / By all this I mean love.
Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules:
The original Middle English; Seynt Valentyne shows up in lines 305-312.
A modern-English translation.
Chaucer was a trade professional as well as a romantic poet, having spent the years 1374-1386 tallying wool exports and wine tariff revenue as Richard II’s Controller of Customs. They paid him 10 pounds a year plus a gallon of wine per day, and he wrote the Parliament in off hours. The U.K.’s National Archives looks at Chaucer’s trade policy career.
From flower-bed to florist:
The Colombian Flower Growers Association, ASCOLFLORES, recalls its first U.S.-Colombia FTA shipment.
Air cargo firms manage Colombia-to-Miami charters.
Miami International Airport (2023) explains flower transit.
Customs and Border Protection on letting flowers in while keeping thrips out.
The National Retail Federation’s 2024 Valentine forecast.
V-Day stats from the Society of American Florists.
… and also from the SAF, an appeal for GSP reauthorization.
Elsewhere:
The Netherlands is the world’s largest flower buyer at about $5.4 billion a year, or half of the value of flower trade. Most of this transits the gigantic Aalsmeer flower market just outside Amsterdam, which serves as the center for European flower trade and the main market for growers in Kenya and Ethiopia. Royal Flora Holland has the facts and figures.
And last:
How did roses become the Valentine’s Day standard? It’s likely no one really knows, but one theory traces the tradition to a series of letters sent to U.K. friends in 1718 by Mary Wortley Montagu from the Ottoman court, and published in book form a half-century later in 1763. (The Ottoman nobility were rose and tulip enthusiasts; roses are Persian by origin.) Letter #42 records a ‘flower language’ in which seraglio ladies assigned emotional meanings to different flowers and luxury products, and used them to send coded notes to friends and outside admirers. Nineteenth-century French and Brits then built this into a gigantic “flower language” (“floriography”); an 1819 book by Charlotte Delatour cataloged meanings for 713 flowers (including 29 separate rose varieties), nursery plants, and other garden products such as fruits and tree branches.
People with deep gardening expertise and memorization powers could use this to convey signals pretty far beyond modern candy-heart romance — all the way (at least to a modern eye) from “platonic affection” and “romantic love” to “alternative life-style” and “stalker”. For example, while a generic rose means “love,” and a white rose means “I am worthy of you,” a dog rose conveys an eyebrow-raising “pleasure and pain” message, and a maiden blush rose a frankly menacing “if you lose me, you will find it out.”
The need to keep these hundreds of definitions straight, and to be very sure you know which rose is which, must have put amateurs at constant risk of embarrassing blunders and awkward misunderstandings. Modern flower association lists are much shorter and PPI trade staff think it’s probably better that way. Some more examples from Delatour, though, for those interested:
Cypress branch: “Death and eternal sorrow”
Daffodil: “Deceitful hope”
Daisy: “Beauty and innocence”
“Grass-leaved goosefoot” “I declare war against you”
Jasmine: “Sensuality”
Meadow saffron: “My best days are past”
Potato “Benevolence”
White poppy “Sleep”
Lady Mary’s Turkish Embassy Letters. See Letter 42 for the flower language, also Letter 25 for brief nudity, Letter 9 for a rant against Viennese fashion (“monstrous and contrary to all reason”), and Letter 35 for pioneering vaccination advocacy.
Delatour’s original Artistic Language of Flowers.
And a modern essay on the origins and practice of floriography, with a list of known flower messages.
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
