Why the studio sits where it sits
Our Downtown studio is on Olive Street, nine tenths of a mile from the Los Angeles Flower District. I did not choose that address for the view. I chose it because it is about a twenty minute walk from the place this city's flowers actually arrive, and because a short walk is the whole difference between going to the market most mornings and going when it happens to be convenient.
The markets trade from five, Monday to Saturday. Our day starts at six for that reason and no other. By the time a shop opens at ten, the stems worth arguing over have been gone for hours, and what is left on the floor is what nobody with an early start wanted.
I have people who could go for me. I still go, several mornings a week. It is the part of this job I would give up last.
What a photograph cannot tell you
Almost everything in the trade is sold by picture now. A wholesaler sends a photograph of a box of roses, you say yes, the box turns up. The photograph is not dishonest. It is simply useless for the only question that matters, which is when the stem was cut.
You cannot see that in an image. A rose cut yesterday and a rose cut four days ago are identical in a photograph, and they behave nothing alike on somebody's kitchen table. One opens slowly across a week. The other opens in two days and then drops its outer petals all at once, usually on the third day, usually in front of the person you sent it to.
You cannot hear it over the phone either, which is why I do not order the things that matter that way.
What I am actually doing with my hands
I bend the stem near the base. A fresh stem resists and springs back. An old one gives, and keeps the bend.
I look at the cut end. It should be pale and wet. Brown and dried out means it has been standing somewhere a long time, and no amount of fresh water brings back a stem that has already sealed itself.
I look at the guard petals on a rose — the coarse outer ones that protect the bloom in transit. A bunch stripped back to look pretty in the bucket has usually been stripped because those petals had already gone over, and what you are being shown is the second layer, not the first.
I put my face into the bucket. Water that has been standing turns before the flower does, and you can smell it long before you can see it.
Then I pick the bunch up and feel how the head sits against the stem. A head that is heavier than the stem wants to carry has been drinking hard to keep up, and it will fold in a warm room by the second afternoon.
None of this is clever. It is slow, it has to be done standing up in a cold room, and it takes a couple of hours I would otherwise spend asleep.
The argument I have with myself most weeks
Buying this way costs us. Some mornings I come back without the flower a customer asked for by name, because the only ones on the floor were four days old and I would rather lose the order than sell them. That is a lost order and an awkward phone call, and I have never once regretted it by the Friday.
It also means our range moves. What we can make well in March is not what we can make well in August. I would rather say so than pretend otherwise, which is why I wrote the whole California calendar out in what is actually in season in Los Angeles, using the growers' own published dates rather than ours.
Three things that decide themselves at the market
These are the sort of stems you settle in the first ten seconds of picking up the bunch, before you have thought about colour or shape or what anybody wants them for.
Pearl Silence
Ranunculus tells you its age faster than any flower I buy — if the neck is soft in the bucket it is soft on the table, so this one is chosen by hand or not at all.
Petal Glacé
Every peony in this city has flown to get here, so the only real check is the one you do with your thumb on the bud: it should be firm and giving, not hard and not soft.
Candy Bloom
Garden roses are where the guard petals matter most, and the scent in the bucket at six in the morning is the thing no photograph has ever managed to send me.
Go and see it once
The Flower District is open to everybody, not only the trade, and I think every person in this city should walk through it once. Where the two markets are, what it costs to get in, where to park and how to behave on the floor are all written down in a florist's guide to the Los Angeles Flower District. Go on a weekday, go early, take cash.
If you would rather we did the standing about in the cold, that is the arrangement. Look through our bouquets, or call +1 (626) 888-8449 and tell me what it is for. Our Downtown LA studio is the one nearest the market; there are two more, in Glendale and Pasadena, and we deliver across everywhere we cover in Los Angeles. If you need something today, Ready Now is made up from whatever came back with me that morning. If the flowers arrive and they are not fresh, we replace them or refund you.
Two other things I have put in writing, because people keep asking: why the mono-bouquet is harder than it looks, and the things I tell customers that they do not want to hear. There is one more on why flowers for a shop are not flowers for a person, which begins at the same bench, at the same hour, with an entirely different set of questions.