In honor of Valentine’s Day this weekend, I’m going to talk about the most popular
flower for the holiday: roses.
Roses have been around much longer than humans, for millions of years.
Fossils of roseaceous species have been found in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.
The earliest are primarily from the Eocene period, which spanned 56 to 33.9 million years
ago.
This was in the early part of the Cenozic era, a span also known as the Age of Mammals.
These rose-like species eventually evolved into the wild roses we see today.
Wild roses, however, probably don’t look like what you think of as roses.
Roses are in the family Rosaceae, and naturally have only 5 petals, like this one.
The rose family also includes important food crops, like apples, pears and cherries.
The cut roses people give by the dozens are cultivated roses, that have been bred over
time to have more petals and grow differently than their wild counterparts.
The first cultivated roses were grown around 5,000 years ago, possibly in China.
Cultivated roses were created through the accidental or purposeful cross-breeding of
wild roses, to create new varieties with desirable characteristics.
This might include petal color, stem length, smell or even when they flower.
Today there are literally thousands of varieties of rose, including ones that are intended
to be grown in gardens, and ones intended for mass production on cut flower farms.
Roses are the most popular cut flower in the United States, outpacing carnations by more
than double.
In 2005, the US imported 1.3 billion stems of roses and produced almost 99 million domestically.
That makes 1.4 billion rose stems purchased in just one year.
We are, it would appear, enamored with roses.
Most of the United States’ cut flowers come from Central and South America, primarily
Colombia.
Holland, as you might expect, is the largest producer of cut flowers in the world, but
due to distance, they only contribute a small percentage of US imports.
Ecuador also contributes a large portion of US imports, especially roses.
Roses are grown in plastic greenhouses, where they can be protected from the elements.
Growing roses is a delicate process, and no farm wants to lose valuable blossoms to a
rough storm.
Pesticides and herbicides are used in the growing process, some of them illegal in the
US, in the case of non-domestic flowers.
An example in roses is the use of fungicides to prevent botrytis, a fungus that ruins flower
petals.
Flowers might literally be dipped in fungicide before leaving the growers.
Something to keep in mind the next time you buy a bouquet.
As you might guess, Valentine’s Day is the busiest day of the year for florists.
At flower farms, growers will cap flower buds starting in December and January, to stop
them from blooming until they’re needed.
One third of the year’s cut flower sales happen at Valentine’s Day.
All right, hopefully you now know a little bit more about the flowers you might be giving
or receiving this weekend!
I got a lot of the information for this video from the book Flower Confidential by Amy Stewart,
which I highly recommend if you’d like more information about the cut flower industry.
Thanks so much for watching, and don’t forget to like and subscribe to see more botany content!
See you next time.