Given With Both Hands
It is the third week of April and Rosario Villanueva is doing the thing she does every year at this time: trying to talk her wholesale buyers out of red roses. Not because she does not grow them — she grows millions of them, on forty hectares of greenhouse land outside Villa del Río in Colombia’s Antioquia department, at an altitude of 2,200 metres where the light is strong and the temperature differential between day and night is precisely what roses require to develop colour and hold their heads. She grows them extremely well. But red roses are for Valentine’s Day, she says, and the buyers who want red roses for Mother’s Day are buyers who have not thought carefully enough about what the occasion actually requires.
What it requires, in her view, is pink. Soft pink, warm pink, the pink of a flower that says something other than romantic love — something more layered, more long-standing, more complicated and more generous than the message a red rose carries. It requires carnations, which her grandmother grew and her mother grew and which she grows still, in varieties that her competitors in Kenya and Ethiopia have not yet managed to replicate. It requires spray roses in cream and peach. It requires, above all, an understanding that Mother’s Day is not Valentine’s Day with different packaging, and that the women who receive flowers on the second Sunday of May — or the fourth Sunday of Lent in the British tradition, or the second Sunday of May in the American one that has now spread, through the inexorable mechanism of global retail, to most of the rest of the world — are not being courted. They are being thanked. These are different gestures and they require different flowers.
Villanueva has been making this argument to buyers for fifteen years. She has not entirely won it. But she has not stopped making it.
The global flower industry mobilises around Mother’s Day in a way that is, by most measures, extraordinary. It is the single largest flower-buying occasion of the year in most Western markets — larger than Valentine’s Day in the United Kingdom, roughly equivalent to it in the United States, and growing steadily in markets from Japan to Brazil where the American-model holiday has been adopted and localised. The stems that will end up in vases on dining tables and kitchen windowsills across the world on the second Sunday of May begin their journey months earlier, in greenhouses in Colombia, Kenya, the Netherlands, Ecuador, and a dozen other growing regions whose names most buyers have never considered. They travel by air freight — cut flowers are among the most time-sensitive agricultural commodities on earth — in refrigerated containers, through distribution centres, through wholesalers and supermarkets and petrol stations and motorway services, arriving in the hands of children and grandchildren who have, in many cases, given very little thought to what they are giving beyond the fact that flowers are what you give.
This guide proposes that more thought is available, and that the flowers of Mother’s Day — their histories, their meanings, their origins in traditions that long predate the greeting-card industry — reward it.
01 — The Carnation
Dianthus caryophyllus — Villa del Río, Colombia / Málaga, Spain
The carnation is the original Mother’s Day flower and, in the contemporary Western market, the most consistently misunderstood. Its association with the holiday was not accidental or commercial. It was deliberate, specific, and rooted in grief.
Anna Jarvis, the American woman who campaigned for the establishment of Mother’s Day as a formal US holiday in the first decade of the 20th century, chose the white carnation as the flower of the occasion because it was her mother’s favourite flower. Ann Reeves Jarvis — the mother whose memory Anna Jarvis spent her adult life honouring and whose early advocacy for mothers’ health in the aftermath of the Civil War provided much of the moral impetus for the holiday — had grown and loved white carnations, and at the first official Mother’s Day service in 1908 in Grafton, West Virginia, Anna Jarvis distributed white carnations to the congregation. The choice was not symbolic in any generalised sense. It was an act of specific, personal grief, expressed through a specific, personal flower.
The symbolism Jarvis attached to the carnation was nevertheless precise. The white carnation’s inability to droop before it dies — it does not wilt and hang its head as many cut flowers do; it simply fades, remaining upright to the end — she read as an emblem of a mother’s love: always giving, never asking, maintaining its form until there is nothing left. She specified that white carnations should be worn by those whose mothers had died and coloured carnations — pink or red — by those whose mothers were still living. This distinction, now almost entirely forgotten, was once widely observed across the United States and was understood to transform a buttonhole into a form of public testimony about one’s relationship to loss.
The carnation’s commercial story runs in parallel to this history and, in most of the world, has overtaken it. Dianthus caryophyllus — the scientific name meaning, roughly, “divine flower of Jupiter,” the genus being among the oldest recorded in Western botanical literature — has been cultivated around the Mediterranean for at least two thousand years. It appears in ancient Greek garlands, in Roman ritual, in the paintings of the Flemish masters, in the buttonholes of Oscar Wilde. The development of the modern commercial carnation industry, however, is largely a story of the second half of the 20th century and particularly of Colombia, where altitude, climate, cheap labour, and investment in refrigerated air freight infrastructure combined to create, from the 1960s onwards, a cut-flower export industry that now produces the majority of carnations sold in the United States and a significant proportion of those sold in Europe.
Rosario Villanueva’s farm is a part of this story. Her grandmother grew carnations in the 1970s, when the Colombian industry was establishing itself; her mother expanded the operation in the 1990s as international demand grew; Villanueva herself has added the spray roses and the premium varieties that the contemporary market demands, but the carnations remain, in her view, the honest centre of the business. They are, she says, harder to grow well than people think. The varieties that hold their form and their fragrance — which has been bred out of most commercial carnations in favour of longevity and transit resilience — are not easy to source. She grows a Spanish variety, from old stock traced to growers in the Málaga region, whose fragrance is a reminder of what the flower was before the industry standardised it into something easier to ship.
02 — The Rose
Rosa — Quito, Ecuador / Naivasha, Kenya / Aalsmeer, Netherlands
If the carnation is the flower Anna Jarvis intended, the rose is the flower the market chose. In the United Kingdom, the rose is now the single most popular Mother’s Day flower by volume. In the United States, it competes closely with the carnation for primacy. In markets across Asia and Latin America where the American Mother’s Day model has been adopted, the rose — specifically the pink rose — has established itself as the default gift almost regardless of any prior local floral tradition. It is an outcome that would have dismayed Anna Jarvis, who in the final years of her life took out newspaper advertisements condemning the commercialisation of the holiday she had worked to establish. But it is the outcome that obtained.
The rose’s dominance is partly a function of the extraordinary effectiveness of the global cut-flower supply chain and partly a function of the flower’s unmatched symbolic versatility. The rose carries, in Western culture, such a weight of accumulated meaning — love in all its registers, beauty, transience, the duality of softness and thorns — that it functions as a kind of default emotional vocabulary, available for almost any occasion requiring flowers. For Mother’s Day specifically, the relevant registers are the pink ones: soft pink for gratitude and appreciation; warm pink for admiration and care; peach for sincerity and the long, established love of a relationship that predates memory.
The geography of the contemporary rose industry is worth understanding. Ecuador, at altitude on the equatorial Andes, produces roses of exceptional stem length and bloom size — the standard Ecuadorian rose stem is substantially taller than its Dutch or Kenyan equivalent, and the bloom can reach a diameter that surprises buyers accustomed to European produce. The altitude — Quito sits at 2,850 metres — combined with intense equatorial sun and cool nights produces a rose that holds its colour with unusual intensity. Kenya’s Lake Naivasha region, at 1,880 metres on the floor of the Rift Valley, has developed over the past thirty years into one of the world’s largest rose-producing areas, its farms supplying the Dutch auction at Aalsmeer — the largest flower market in the world by transaction volume — with stems that arrive in Amsterdam within 24 hours of being cut.
Aalsmeer itself is worth a note. The Royal FloraHolland auction at Aalsmeer, in the flat polder country southwest of Amsterdam, processes somewhere in the region of 12 billion stems annually, making it the point through which a significant fraction of all cut flowers sold in the world pass at some stage of their journey. The auction clock — a large circular display that counts downward from a high opening price, with buyers stopping the clock by pressing a button when they want to buy — is one of the more arresting objects in the world economy: hundreds of millions of euros of transactions per day, conducted in a building the size of several football pitches, moving at a speed that makes most other forms of commerce look contemplative. Mother’s Day in Aalsmeer is a spectacle of organised urgency that the flowers themselves give no indication of having participated in once they arrive, composed and still, in the petrol station near your house.
03 — The Peony
Paeonia lactiflora — Heze, Shandong / the Willamette Valley, Oregon
The peony is, by the judgment of a significant portion of the florist community, the most beautiful cut flower in existence. It is also, by the same community’s consensus, one of the most difficult to source reliably, to transport without damage, and to time correctly — the window between a peony bud that is too tight to open well in a vase and a peony bloom that is already too far open to last the journey is measured in hours, and the consequences of miscalculating it are irreversible.
This difficulty is, in a sense, appropriate. The peony is a flower that requires patience. It cannot be hurried. It opens on its own schedule, the tightly furled bud unfolding over two or three days into a bloom of extraordinary fullness and complexity — dozens of petals arranged in concentric layers, each one slightly different from the last, the whole assembling itself into a form that is simultaneously extravagant and precise. Watching a peony open over the course of a day is one of the more affecting things the plant kingdom offers.
The association with mothers and with Mother’s Day is not primarily American. In Chinese culture, the peony — Paeonia lactiflora, the herbaceous peony — is the flower of wealth, honour, and feminine beauty, and it has been associated with the qualities attributed to ideal womanhood in the Chinese tradition for well over a thousand years. The Tang dynasty court considered the peony the queen of flowers. The city of Luoyang held peony festivals that drew visitors from across the empire. Heze, in Shandong province, remains the centre of peony cultivation in China today, producing hundreds of varieties in a range of colours that the Western market has only partially explored. On Chinese Mother’s Day — celebrated on the second Sunday of May following the adoption of the American model, though some families observe a separate date on the traditional agricultural calendar — peonies are among the most sought-after gifts.
In the Western market, peonies are a relatively recent arrival in the mainstream Mother’s Day flower category, their availability constrained until recently by the difficulty of producing them at scale outside their natural flowering season. The development of peony cultivation in the Willamette Valley of Oregon and in New Zealand — where the seasons are reversed, allowing Northern Hemisphere markets to be supplied with fresh peonies when their own local crop is out of season — has made them available for Mother’s Day in the United States with increasing reliability over the past two decades. They remain, compared to roses and carnations, expensive. This is partly the supply constraint and partly the difficulty of growing and handling them. It is also, arguably, partly the flower itself, which seems to understand its own value and declines to be rushed.
04 — The Lily
Lilium orientalis — Niigata, Japan / Lisse, Netherlands
The lily that appears at Mother’s Day is not quite the same flower as the Easter lily of the previous guide. The Easter lily is Lilium longiflorum, the trumpet lily, its white blooms associated with purity and resurrection. The Mother’s Day lily is more likely to be Lilium orientalis — the Oriental lily, typically pink or white with recurved petals and a fragrance that is heavy rather than clean, warmly sweet rather than cool and churchly. The distinction matters less to most buyers than to florists and growers, but it illuminates something about how the same genus of plant can carry entirely different symbolic registers depending on which species, which colour, and which occasion is involved.
The Oriental lily’s Mother’s Day associations are rooted in the flower’s combination of visual drama and fragrance. It is a large, spectacular bloom — up to twenty-five centimetres across in the larger commercial varieties — with a fragrance that is impossible to ignore in an enclosed space, and this combination of visual and olfactory presence makes it feel, to many people, like a substantial gift. It takes up space in the room. It announces itself. For a day that is, in its better moments, about acknowledging the substantial presence of a person in one’s life, this seems apt.
The Stargazer lily — a hybrid Oriental lily bred in California in 1974 by Leslie Woodriff, who crossed Lilium auratum and Lilium speciosum to produce a bloom that would face upward rather than drooping downward as its parents did — has become the best-known Mother’s Day lily in the American and British markets. Its deep pink petals with white margins and dark spotting, its upward-facing blooms, and its intense fragrance have made it the variety that most people think of when they think of Oriental lilies. It is also, by some measures, the most commercially successful lily hybrid ever bred, its name registering immediately with buyers who could not identify most other lily varieties. Woodriff, who died in 1997, reportedly received very little financial reward for its development. The lily did not reciprocate this indifference to recognition.
In Japan, where Mother’s Day is observed on the same second Sunday of May and where the cut-flower gifting culture is, if anything, more developed than in Western markets, the pink carnation remains the dominant Mother’s Day flower — a preference that traces back to a campaign by Japanese department stores in the 1930s that specifically promoted carnations for the occasion, establishing an association that has proved remarkably durable. Japanese cut-flower production, centred in Niigata and Aichi prefectures, maintains standards of stem quality, post-harvest handling, and packaging that the global industry regards as a benchmark. The premium Japanese lily varieties — available in domestic markets at prices that would astonish buyers in London or New York — reflect an attitude toward flowers as luxury goods that is distinct from both the volume-commodity approach of the Colombian and Kenyan industries and the Dutch efficiency-at-scale model.
05 — The Tulip
Tulipa — Flevoland, Netherlands / Lincolnshire, England
The tulip’s reappearance in this guide — having already appeared among the Easter flowers, carrying the weight of Persian martyrdom poetry, Ottoman court culture, and Dutch speculative disaster — requires a brief recalibration. At Mother’s Day, the tulip is operating in a different register entirely. It is not the flower of the Passion or of Amsterdam’s financial crises. It is the flower of spring arriving properly, of colour reliable enough to plan around, of cheerfulness that does not require justification.
This cheerfulness is, in fact, a substantive quality rather than a trivial one. The tulip holds its colour with an intensity that few other spring flowers match — a red tulip is red in a way that leaves no uncertainty, a yellow tulip is yellow without qualification, a pink tulip is pink with a precision that other pink flowers approximate but rarely achieve. This quality of being exactly what it appears to be has made the tulip a consistent choice for occasions that call for directness rather than nuance, warmth rather than complexity. Mother’s Day, in its less complicated expressions, is such an occasion.
The Dutch tulip industry, which produces approximately three billion bulbs annually, reaches a significant production peak in the weeks around Mother’s Day. The polder fields of Flevoland and the Bollenstreek are, in late April and early May, as visually spectacular as they are at any point in the year — the strips of colour visible from the air, the roadside stalls selling loose stems to passers-by, the Keukenhof gardens at their busiest. What the visitor to this landscape does not typically see is the harvesting: the mechanical headers that travel the rows removing the flowers, which are discarded by the billion so that the plant’s energy goes into the bulb rather than the bloom. The flowers sold at market are harvested carefully, separately, from fields managed for cut-flower production rather than bulb production. The fields being headed — their flowers destroyed to feed the bulb — are producing next year’s stock.
In the United Kingdom, where tulip growing has expanded considerably in Lincolnshire and in East Anglia over the past decade in response to post-Brexit demand for domestically grown cut flowers, Mother’s Day — falling on the fourth Sunday of Lent, and therefore earlier than the American and European equivalents, typically in late March — aligns almost perfectly with the British tulip harvest. The timing is not entirely coincidental: the British flower industry has worked to develop tulip cultivation specifically to supply the Mother’s Day market. The result is that a flower bought at a British market stall on Mothering Sunday is, with some probability, a flower that was growing in a Lincolnshire field two weeks earlier — a provenance that is both practically superior and symbolically rather more satisfying than a stem that has transited through three countries and a refrigerated warehouse.
06 — The Freesia
Freesia — Aalsmeer, Netherlands / Mwea, Kenya
The freesia is the florist’s favourite flower on an occasion when the florist’s judgment is most likely to be overridden by the customer’s instinct for the familiar. It is also, by almost any measure that does not involve volume or name recognition, the most genuinely affecting of all the Mother’s Day flowers — which is why florists keep putting it in arrangements and customers keep walking past it to the roses.
The case for the freesia rests on fragrance. The freesia’s scent is, in the consensus of perfumers who have worked with it and of the people who encounter it for the first time without having been told what it is, one of the most precisely beautiful of any cut flower: clean and sweet with a quality of freshness that heavier floral fragrances do not possess, faintly citrus, immediate without being insistent. It is a scent that reads as personal rather than ceremonial, intimate rather than declarative. In a cut-flower market that increasingly prizes longevity, transit resilience, and visual impact over fragrance — most commercial roses now have very little of the scent their antecedents possessed — the freesia is among the few remaining widely available flowers that smell, unmistakably and immediately, like flowers.
The freesia is native to the Cape Province of South Africa, where the genus Freesia comprises about fourteen species growing in rocky, well-drained slopes in fynbos vegetation. The cultivated freesias of the commercial market are hybrids developed primarily in the Netherlands from the late 19th century onwards, available in a range of colours — white, yellow, pink, lilac, orange, deep red — with the white and yellow varieties carrying the strongest fragrance and the coloured varieties bred, in part, for visual impact at the expense of scent. The white freesia, allowed to speak for itself in an arrangement where its fragrance can circulate without competition, is one of the arguments for buying from a good florist rather than a supermarket: the florist knows to use it.
The commercial production of freesias is dominated by the Dutch industry, which breeds, grows, and distributes the majority of the world’s commercial freesia stems. Kenyan production, centred in the cooler altitudes of the Mwea region and the areas around Mount Kenya, has grown substantially in recent decades, providing the European market with stems that arrive via Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta airport in the same refrigerated containers that carry roses and carnations to Amsterdam. The Kenyan freesias tend to be slightly more robust than the Dutch hothouse varieties — a function of the stronger light and larger diurnal temperature range of the growing conditions — and the better Kenyan producers have developed a premium-end product that competes effectively with Dutch top grades.
07 — The Hydrangea
Hydrangea macrophylla — Brittany, France / the Azores
The hydrangea arrived in the mainstream cut-flower market relatively recently — it was, for most of the 20th century, primarily a garden plant in Western Europe and North America, its large blooms considered unsuitable for cutting because of their tendency to wilt rapidly once removed from the plant. The development of post-harvest handling techniques that addressed this tendency, combined with a shift in consumer taste toward the full, lush aesthetic that hydrangeas provide in abundance, has made it in the space of roughly two decades one of the most significant cut-flower crops in the European and North American markets.
For Mother’s Day specifically, the hydrangea’s appeal is easy to articulate. The flower head — a dome or globe of dozens of small individual florets, the whole creating a mass of colour that photographs well and fills a vase with a completeness that stems-and-stems of smaller flowers do not quite achieve — reads as generous. It is a flower that looks like a lot, because it is a lot. A single stem of a well-grown hydrangea has a visual weight that requires several stems of most other flowers to match. For a holiday oriented around expressions of gratitude for abundance — for the person who gave a great deal, who continues to give, who does not always receive equivalent acknowledgment — this quality of visible fullness seems appropriate.
The colour range of the hydrangea is unusually variable, and unusually influenced by the chemistry of the soil in which the plant grows. The anthocyanin pigments responsible for the blue and purple tones in Hydrangea macrophylla are more intensely expressed in acid soil and less so in alkaline soil — which is why the same cultivar can produce blue flowers in one garden and pink flowers in an adjacent garden with different soil chemistry. This variability has been managed commercially by adjusting the pH of the growing medium, allowing growers to produce consistent colour. The blue hydrangeas that appear in Mother’s Day arrangements have typically had their colour stabilised by aluminium sulphate additions to the soil; the pinks are grown in more neutral conditions.
The most celebrated hydrangea growing region in Europe is Brittany — particularly the Finistère department, where the combination of Atlantic rainfall, mild temperatures, and acidic granite-based soil produces naturally blue hydrangeas of an intensity that growers elsewhere struggle to replicate in pots. The island of Faial in the Azores, whose volcanic soil and mild climate produce hydrangeas in such abundance that they grow as hedgerow plants along the roadsides and the island is known informally as the Blue Island, represents the outer limit of what the plant can do when conditions are genuinely ideal. Commercial Azorean hydrangeas — grown for export to the Portuguese market and, increasingly, to northern Europe — carry something of this abundance with them.
08 — The Sweet Pea
Lathyrus odoratus — Lompoc, California / West Sussex, England
The sweet pea is the most old-fashioned flower in this survey and, in the considered view of a number of florists who know their trade, the best argument for buying from a specialist rather than a supermarket on Mother’s Day. Not because it is rare — it is not particularly rare, in season — but because it travels poorly, keeps briefly, and is most itself when it is freshest. A sweet pea from a supermarket that has been in a distribution centre for two days is a diminished thing. A sweet pea cut that morning from a specialist grower’s field, its fragrance still sharp and its stem still firm, is something else.
The sweet pea’s fragrance is the point. Like the freesia’s, it is a scent that most people recognise before they can name it — something between floral sweetness and a quality that is harder to identify, a kind of softness or warmth that is neither heavy nor insistent. It is a garden fragrance, a cut-flower fragrance of the old kind, before the development of modern commercial varieties optimised the delicacy and the scent out of the flower in favour of longer vase life and more predictable production. The heritage sweet pea varieties — Spencer types and Grandifloras — that specialist British growers have returned to in recent years have fragrance that the modern commercial varieties lack entirely. Buying them requires knowing to look.
The sweet pea was introduced to Britain from Sicily in the late 17th century and became, through the 18th and 19th centuries, one of the most cultivated cottage garden annuals in the country. The great sweet pea shows of the Edwardian period — when competitive growing was a serious pursuit among both professional and amateur gardeners, and the National Sweet Pea Society was a significant institution — produced a culture of variety development and refinement that laid the foundation for the Spencer varieties still grown today. Henry Eckford, a Scottish gardener working in Shropshire, developed dozens of new varieties in the late 19th century; Silas Cole, head gardener at Althorp in Northamptonshire, introduced the first of the Spencer types — with their distinctive wavy, frilled petals — in 1901.
For Mother’s Day in the British tradition — which falls, as noted, earlier than the American equivalent, in late March or early April — the sweet pea is rarely in season, which is one reason it has not established itself as a primary holiday flower in the way that the tulip has. For the American Mother’s Day in May, it is available from growers in California’s Santa Barbara County, where the Lompoc Valley produces sweet peas in commercial quantities in conditions of almost ideal mildness. The California crop is supplemented by British and Dutch glasshouse production, which can extend the season into the period when outdoor crops are not yet ready. None of these sources quite replicate the experience of a sweet pea cut from a garden in early summer and put directly into a jar of water on a kitchen table. That experience, if it is available, is the recommendation.
Coda
There is an argument — made in various forms by florists, by flower growers, and by a small but persistent literature of cultural criticism — that the cut-flower industry represents one of the more troubling aspects of a global economy that extracts value from vulnerable places at low prices and delivers it to wealthy places at high margins. That the workers who cut the roses in Kenya and the carnations in Colombia are not, in the main, the workers who are being thanked on Mother’s Day. That the distance between the field and the vase obscures a relationship that, if visible, might give pause.
Rosario Villanueva, back in her greenhouse outside Villa del Río, is aware of this argument. She has heard versions of it from buyers, from journalists, and from the certification bodies whose standards she meets and whose labels she carries. She is not dismissive of it. She is, she says, a mother herself, and the women who work on her farm are also mothers — many of them, raising children in the surrounding villages on wages that, by Colombian standards in the sector, are above average, in conditions that, by the standards she has seen elsewhere in the industry, are decent. She is not making an argument that the industry is without problems. She is making an argument that the problems are more specific and more tractable than the generalised critique suggests, and that the right response is better sourcing and higher standards rather than the conclusion that the flowers themselves are the problem.
The flowers themselves are not the problem. They are, as they have always been, among the most direct means available to human beings for expressing what resists more direct expression: gratitude, love, the acknowledgement of a debt that cannot be repaid, the desire to mark a relationship that has not always been easy and will not always be easy and is, nevertheless, the most fundamental relationship most of us have ever had.
Anna Jarvis chose a carnation because it was her mother’s favourite flower. That is, perhaps, the whole of the argument.
Maison XXII recommends
Flor de Mayo, Villa del Río, Colombia — Rosario Villanueva’s farm supplies to the European and North American markets via certified exporters. Direct orders are not available to retail buyers, but the farm is part of the Rainforest Alliance-certified grower network; buying certified Colombian flowers ensures a direct connection to producers of this standard. rainforest-alliance.org
The Real Flower Company, Hampshire, England — one of the leading British advocates for scented, seasonal, garden-style floristry, sourcing from biodynamic and organic growers and offering varieties — including heritage sweet peas, open-form garden roses, and scented freesias — not available through mainstream retailers. realflowers.co.uk
Keukenhof, Lisse, Netherlands — the tulip section is at its peak in late April and early May, coinciding with the European Mother’s Day window. The cut-flower halls, which operate separately from the garden display, offer a view of the commercial varieties alongside the display cultivars. keukenhof.nl
Flower Auction Aalsmeer, Aalsmeer, Netherlands — visitor tours of the Royal FloraHolland auction floor are available on weekday mornings; the best days to see Mother’s Day volume are the Tuesday and Wednesday of the week before the holiday. floraholland.com