The rose is one of the oldest flowers in cultivation, having been grown for over 5,000 years. The rose is a woody ornamental, in nurseryman’s terms. It needs extra coaxing to bring it into flower for special times of the year, like Valentine’s Day.

Commercial growers who provide the blooms for florists grow them in environmentally controlled, enclosed greenhouse structures. The plants are heated, fertilized, monitored for insect and disease control, and carefully watered to bring them into bloom for these special occasions.

For Valentine’s Day, for example,  it takes about 55 days in the greenhouse to produce a rose. Production in the summer months is much faster due to the naturally higher temperatures and daylight. The shorter days of later December, January and early February, combined with often overcast or cloudy days at this time of the year, make for poor growing conditions, taking the roses a longer time to develop.

Obviously, because of the longer time it takes to grow roses during this time of year and the additional heat required, this is the most expensive time of the year in which roses are grown.

At the same time, this holiday is a strong rose occasion, so producers time their crop carefully to be able to provide the retail florists with two to four times the normal amount of roses they might normally use in a week. This means a busy week for the rose plant, the grower and the retail florist, who work to insure the freshness of each bloom delivered.

Roses Grown Outside the U.S. and Canada

A number of cut flower retailers in the U.S., Canada and other parts of the world offer roses that are grown in either Colombia or Ecuador.

As the temperatures in the flower growing areas in these countries seldom fall below 40^oF, most greenhouses in South America are not fully enclosed. They also do not have the supplemental heat and internal climate control features of a North American greenhouse. As such, it may take them as much as twice the time (90 to 120 days or longer, depending on variety) to produce a rose flower.

As the rose is a woody ornamental, the longer it takes to produce the flower, the more woody the stem becomes. This consideration, plus the time it may take to transport the blooms to your local floral retailer, can mean you need to care for them a little differently to insure they take up water and open fully as compared with roses that have been locally grown.

Water uptake is very important to the rose as it provides the means through which the cells in the petals can expand and force open the bloom to give its full fragrance and beauty. Without water uptake, the rose may wilt prematurely or the petals may fail to unfurl, providing the various stages of flower openness that are unique to the rose as a cut flower.

A fresh rose should last from five to seven days and open from a bud stage where it first has all but just two or three of its petals held closely to the bud. As the flower draws water and the bud opens, the petals should unfurl, taking the flower through stages of life similar to our human development. . . adolescent, pre-teen, teenager, young adult, adult and on to old age as it may then drop its petals which you can collect for potpourri.

ICFG recommends that South American roses which have a very woody, thick stem or appear to have been out of water for a long period of time should have the stem ends submerged in a slightly warm floral preservative solution. The ends of the stems can then be re-cut with a sharp knife or shears to remove several inches of the stem end under the solution. This will open a new section of the water conductive tissue and help the flower absorb needed solution to open. A low pH solution made up with citric acid, such as found in citrus fruit drinks, can also help improve water uptake.

Floral preservative packets can be obtained from most cut flower retailers. Additional care and handling information can be found by clicking here.