The American holiday that Anna Jarvis invented — and spent the rest of her life trying to destroy — is now a $35 billion industry with a grief problem. A new generation of florists is trying to reckon with who gets left out of the celebration.
The cooler at Butterbee Farm in Baltimore runs along the entire back wall of a former warehouse, and on a Tuesday morning in late April, Laura Beth Resnick is standing in front of it thinking about what she can promise her customers for Mother’s Day.
She has ranunculus. She has tulips — though they’re fading; in the mid-Atlantic, tulips don’t linger into May. She has the very beginning of sweet peas, which she holds between two fingers for a moment, rubbing the stem. She grows more than forty varieties of flowers on her farm, most of them varieties you won’t find at a grocery store because they’re too fragile, or too short-lived, or too distinctly themselves to survive the standardization of the industrial supply chain. She does not grow roses. “I can’t really grow roses in the mid-Atlantic,” she says, “so I don’t try.”
This seems like an obvious statement. It is also, in the context of the $35 billion American flower industry — in which the overwhelming majority of cut flowers are imported, most of them by air freight from Colombia and Ecuador and Kenya and Ethiopia — something close to a radical act. To grow what is actually growing, where you actually are, and sell it to the people who actually live nearby: this is the philosophical position of the Slow Flowers movement, an advocacy effort started by a Seattle-based writer named Debra Prinzing in 2013, and it is also, Resnick will tell you with some satisfaction, increasingly a viable business model.
But Resnick is also aware of what Mother’s Day represents for a farm like hers — and it is not only the logistical challenge of early May blooms and uncertain spring temperatures. It is the question of who, exactly, is supposed to be celebrating, and whether everyone who will walk through the door or open their inbox in the weeks before the second Sunday of May is actually in a position to do that.
“Flowers mean something,” she says. “They’ve always meant something. The question is whether you’re thinking about what they mean to the specific person who’s going to receive them.”
The modern American Mother’s Day was created, almost entirely, by a woman who ended up hating it. Anna Jarvis — born in 1864 in Webster, West Virginia, the daughter of Ann Reeves Jarvis, a women’s rights activist who had spent her life organizing mothers’ clubs to improve public health conditions — campaigned for years after her mother’s death in 1905 to establish a national day of maternal recognition. She succeeded in 1914, when Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation establishing the second Sunday of May as Mother’s Day. She spent the next three decades trying to get it back.
What Jarvis had imagined was private and hand-made: a letter, a visit, a white carnation worn in the lapel. What she got was an industry. By the 1920s, florists were marking up carnation prices by 40 and 50 percent in the weeks before May. Greeting card companies were printing millions of units. Candy companies, she noted bitterly in a 1920s pamphlet, “put a white ribbon on a box of candy and advance the price just because it’s Mother’s Day. There is no connection between candy and this day. It is pure commercialization.”
She protested outside flower shops. She filed lawsuits. She once stood up at a carnation sale and attempted to shut it down; she was arrested. She petitioned Congress to rescind the holiday she had created. She died in 1948, in a sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania, penniless and childless. A legend persists — never verified, but too pointed to dismiss entirely — that some of her medical bills were paid by the greeting card and floral industries she had spent her final years fighting.
There is something that takes the breath away about the image: the woman who invented Mother’s Day, kept alive by the people she’d been trying to stop, dying without ever having won. But Jarvis, for all the righteousness of her position, may have misidentified the problem. The commercial holiday was not, in itself, the enemy. What she was really fighting — what she named as commercialization but what is more precisely described as thoughtlessness — is a different matter. And it is exactly the quality that the most interesting people now working in the flower industry are trying to address.
Lucy was a copywriter at a company called Bloom & Wild, an online florist based in London, when she wrote the email. It was March 2019. The company was approaching its Mother’s Day marketing cycle, and Lucy had been thinking about something she’d noticed the previous year: that a number of customers had written in asking to be removed from the Mother’s Day mailing list. Not because they didn’t like Bloom & Wild. Because the emails were hard for them to receive.
She wrote four sentences. They said, essentially: we know Mother’s Day can be a difficult time for some people, and if you’d prefer not to hear from us about it this month, you don’t have to. Just click here.
She sent it on a Sunday, she would later explain, because she thought people were more likely to have time to read their email. She did not expect what happened next.
Almost 18,000 people clicked the opt-out link. And then they wrote back. They wrote about losing their mothers. About years of IVF treatment. About mothers who had been abusive, or absent, or simply gone in ways that “spoil her, she deserves it” could not acknowledge without cruelty. The recurring phrase in the letters — repeated across hundreds of messages from people who had never previously contacted the company — was some version of thank you for noticing.
“I had no idea,” Lucy told a magazine afterward. “I had no idea so many people would find it so touching.”
What she had stumbled onto — or, more precisely, what she had done the quiet labor of noticing — was a gap between the industry’s model of its customer and the actual population of people who shop for flowers in May. The model assumed celebration. The reality was considerably more complicated.
The commercial response was, to put it plainly, excellent. On the day the campaign launched, Bloom & Wild’s social media engagement quadrupled. The goodwill generated in the days and weeks that followed — the brand loyalty, the word-of-mouth, the coverage in outlets that don’t typically write about flower delivery companies — was worth substantially more than the mailing list attrition. The following year, Bloom & Wild formalized the idea into something they called the Thoughtful Marketing Movement, inviting other brands to adopt similar opt-out policies. Over 100 companies eventually joined. By 2021, the opt-out had expanded: customers who elected not to see Mother’s Day content would find no trace of it anywhere on the website when they were logged in — not the homepage, not the menus, not the product pages.
The idea crossed the Atlantic. It crossed the Equator. It reached the floor of the House of Commons, where Matt Warman, a Conservative MP who had been orphaned at 27, described the “dread” of receiving promotional emails after a parental death and called for a voluntary advertising code. In Australia, a growing roster of brands began offering opt-outs. In Singapore. In Hong Kong. What had started as a Sunday-morning hunch about email timing had become something that looked, tentatively, like a new way of understanding what a business owes its customers.
I want to pause here on a question that sounds simple but isn’t: who, exactly, does Mother’s Day hurt?
The obvious answer is the bereaved — the people who have lost their mothers. But grief, as bereavement researchers have documented with some care, does not follow the linear schedule that marketing calendars assume. The first Mother’s Day after a loss is often survivable on the strength of shock and community support. The second or third can be harder, as the insulation falls away and the permanence of the absence becomes real in a different, quieter way. The promotional email that arrives five years after a death can land as hard as the one that arrived five months after. There is no expiration date on the feeling of being ambushed by a pink carnation in a subject line.
Then there is infertility, which affects approximately one in six couples and which is, in the weeks around Mother’s Day, one of the least visible forms of pain in public life. The holiday is not designed with these people in mind. It was designed — it has always been designed — around the assumption that motherhood is the default, the goal, the natural conclusion of adult womanhood, and that the second Sunday of May is the occasion for celebrating its achievement. For a woman in her third round of IVF, or for a couple who has recently decided, after years of trying, to stop trying, the arrival of Mother’s Day marketing is not neutral.
Miscarriage — which affects roughly one in four pregnancies, making it simultaneously the most common pregnancy complication and one of the most profoundly unacknowledged — produces its own particular geography of pain around the holiday. The woman who was pregnant last Mother’s Day and is not pregnant this one. The woman who would have been celebrating her first Mother’s Day as a mother, if things had gone differently. These experiences exist at enormous scale, and the flower industry, which has spent a century perfecting the art of reaching people in moments of emotional intensity, has mostly preferred not to think about them.
Beyond grief and loss, there are the structural exclusions that the industry’s visual language has encoded for decades without really intending to. The same-sex couple where both partners are mothers. The transgender woman who is a mother and whose experience of motherhood is rarely represented in mainstream advertising imagery. The grandmother who has been the primary caregiver for years but whom the industry consistently positions as an add-on, a supplementary honoree, rather than the central figure of the household. The father who has raised his children alone. The older sibling who stepped in. The person whose relationship with their mother was characterized, for reasons they are not required to explain to anyone, by harm, or absence, or a chill so deep that “she deserves the best” reads as satire.
“Not all relationships with mothers are positive,” reads a guide developed by Bloom & Song, a florist in Hong Kong, for its industry peers. “Some individuals may have strained or toxic relationships. For these customers, the holiday may evoke feelings of anger, sadness, or confusion.”
The guide recommends using “inclusive language.” It recommends visualizing “diverse family structures.” It recommends that staff be trained not to ask “What are you getting for your mom?” — a question that encodes, in six words, the assumption of an entire industry — and instead to say “Who are you celebrating today?” or simply “How can I help you?”
The alternative formulation seems almost embarrassingly simple. Which is perhaps why it has taken this long to arrive.
In 2020, a woman named Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta founded a nonprofit called Evermore Blooms. She had been thinking about it since 2017, when, on the two-year anniversary of her first miscarriage, an anonymous bouquet appeared at her door.
She still doesn’t know who sent it. “It made me feel so cared for,” she told me. “So seen. Like someone remembered with me.”
Evermore Blooms sends flowers to mothers of miscarriage — not for Mother’s Day, necessarily, but on the anniversary of a loss, or on what would have been a due date. It works through partnerships with local florists who often provide their services at cost, or donate their time entirely. “These are dates a mother never forgets,” the organization’s website explains. “But when they come around, her initial support system has faded or unintentionally forgotten.”
What Hauge-Zavaleta had identified, and what the best florists in the mindful-marketing conversation have also identified, is that flowers are not, at their oldest and deepest, a celebration technology. They are a witness technology. The forget-me-not does not need a caption. The sympathy arrangement sent to a house where someone has died does not require explanation. The bouquet that arrived at Hauge-Zavaleta’s door on the anniversary of her miscarriage communicated something that grief counselors spend years trying to put into words: I have not forgotten. I am here.
The florists who have started stocking forget-me-nots prominently in the first two weeks of May — alongside the pink carnations and the peach ranunculus arranged for Instagram — are not making a grand political statement. They are restoring, in a small way, the older and less comfortable meaning of the flower.
The conversation about who the holiday is for sits alongside a different conversation about the environmental costs of the holiday — and the two, it turns out, are related in ways that illuminate something important about what thoughtfulness actually requires.
Nearly 80 percent of cut flowers sold in the United States are imported. The majority come from Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, and Ethiopia — grown in vast, temperature-controlled growing operations and transported by air freight to refrigerated distribution centers and on to shops and doorsteps. Air freight is, by most measures, the most carbon-intensive mode of commercial transport available. The environmental cost of the roses in the Mother’s Day bouquet is substantially higher than its retail price reflects.
The social cost of the same supply chain is no more comfortable to examine. Large-scale cut-flower farms in the Global South have faced decades of scrutiny over labor conditions — wages, worker protections, and the pesticide regimes designed to produce the blemish-free, long-lived blooms that the European and American wholesale market demands. Certification programs exist: Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, Veriflora. Some florists source exclusively from certified farms. The market penetration of genuinely ethical supply chains, by most estimates, remains limited.
Debra Prinzing, the founder of the Slow Flowers movement, started thinking about this more than a decade ago. She had been writing about home and garden design for years when she began noticing the distance — the literally oceanic distance — between the flowers in American stores and the places where they’d been grown. In 2013, she published a book called “Slow Flowers,” drawing a deliberate analogy to the slow food movement that had, over a generation, pushed back against industrial agriculture by arguing for local, seasonal, and sustainably grown alternatives. “Grown not flown” became the movement’s shorthand. The Slow Flowers Society launched an online directory in 2014, listing florists and farms committed to local sourcing. It now has nearly 700 members.
The practical implications of that commitment are more demanding than the name suggests. To source locally is to accept seasonality — to acknowledge that in early May in the mid-Atlantic, you have what the mid-Atlantic is actually producing. Peonies, if the spring has cooperated. The last tulips. The beginning of sweet peas. Not year-round roses in eleven colors. Not the seamless abundance engineered by a supply chain spanning three continents.
Amber Flack, who runs Little Acre Flowers in Washington, D.C., and sources almost entirely from local farms, describes the constraint in practical terms. “The closer to the source, the less distance there is to travel,” she says. “That’s going to be a more sustainable option.” She adds, in a way that sounds almost apologetic but isn’t: “A lot of traditional florists use floral foam, which is a shortcut, but it is wildly toxic and it’s just kind of leaking microplastics everywhere.”
Floral foam — the dense green block that has held flower stems in position since 1954 and that is responsible for the precise, architectural look of most commercial arrangements — is, researchers have found, an environmental problem with a specificity that makes it difficult to ignore. A single block contains the plastic equivalent of ten shopping bags. It does not biodegrade. It crumbles into microplastics that contaminate waterways and are ingested by aquatic animals. A study by RMIT University in Australia found that the chemicals leaching from floral foam microplastics were more toxic to freshwater invertebrates than those from most other plastic families. The florists who work with it daily — cutting it, soaking it, washing it down the drain — are exposed to formaldehyde, barium sulfates, and carbon black as a matter of professional routine.
Since 2023, floral foam has been banned from RHS shows, including the Chelsea Flower Show. Blooming Haus, a London florist with both Planet Mark and B Corp certification, has eliminated it entirely, replacing it with kenzans — the small, weighted, pin-studded discs that Japanese flower arrangers have used for centuries — along with chicken wire, moss, and reusable water vessels. New plastic-free alternatives are entering the professional market.
Giving it up, though, is genuinely difficult. It changes not just the material under the flowers but the entire logic of construction — the angles of stems, the stability of large arrangements, the ability to position a single flower at an exact degree of inclination. For a small shop facing the highest-volume weekend of the year, the foam-free commitment is not costless. Which is, in part, why the florists making it deserve more attention than the gesture typically receives.
The question of whether any of this is commercially viable is the first one most florists raise when they encounter the mindful-marketing argument. It is also, as it turns out, the easiest one to answer.
Bloom & Wild’s opt-out campaign did not reduce Mother’s Day revenue. It quadrupled engagement. The loyalty it generated — the specific, durable, resistant-to-competition loyalty that accrues when a company demonstrates genuine care for its customers — was worth more than any promotional campaign the same budget could have purchased. Florists aligned with the Slow Flowers movement charge a premium for locally sourced arrangements and report customers who are more likely to return and more likely to bring friends. The florists who have expanded their definition of motherhood — who market to grandmothers, to mentors, to chosen family, to the father raising his kids alone — report bigger audiences, not smaller ones.
The average amount spent per transaction among consumers who bought from local florists hit a record high in 2025. The Slow Flowers directory recorded its highest-ever traffic around Mother’s Day. The opt-out model has spread to more than 100 brands across multiple countries.
None of this immunizes the movement against its own contradictions. Greenwashing is a real and documented phenomenon in the sustainable-flowers space, where “locally grown” claims sometimes conceal more complicated sourcing arrangements. Opt-out campaigns can be and sometimes are deployed as brand positioning exercises with little genuine substance — performances of empathy rather than its enactment. Customers who have been on the receiving end of performative sensitivity tend to develop a fairly precise radar for it.
The florists building lasting businesses on these foundations tend to share a single distinguishing characteristic: their values are visible in their practice. The foam-free workbench. The farm name handwritten on the price card. The member of staff who says “How can I help you?” in a way that makes it clear she is actually waiting for the answer.
Back in Baltimore, Laura Beth Resnick is building arrangements for a local florist’s Mother’s Day order. She is working with the sweet peas, which are fragile and need to be used quickly, and with the ranunculus, which will last. She doesn’t use floral foam. She uses a kenzan and chicken wire and, where the design allows it, the structural integrity of the stems themselves.
She talks about her customers the way florists sometimes do — with the particular intimacy of someone who sees people at the moments they most need to give or receive something they can’t say in words. She sees the person buying flowers for her living mother. She sees the person buying flowers for a grave. She sees the person who comes in looking for something to give herself, on a day that has become, over the years, something to get through rather than celebrate.
“Flowers have always been about feeling something that’s hard to say,” she says. “We just forgot that for a while. We started treating it like it was only ever about celebration.” She holds up a stem of sweet peas, pale purple, almost translucent in the light from the cooler. “It’s not only about that. It was never only about that.”
Anna Jarvis, who died in a sanitarium fighting the industry that may or may not have paid her bills, had wanted something that the commercial world could not, she believed, provide: a holiday that belonged to the feeling rather than to the market. She was probably wrong about that — probably too categorical, too wounded by what she’d seen the industry do to her creation, to allow for the possibility that commerce and genuine care might sometimes point in the same direction.
But she understood something that the most interesting people working in flowers today are rediscovering: that the flower, at its best, is not a product. It is a promise. A promise that says: I have thought about you. I know what you are carrying. I am here.
The industry is very slowly, very commercially, very imperfectly learning to make that promise to more people — including the people it has, for a hundred years, preferred not to see.
Outside a flower shop somewhere, in the first week of May, there are forget-me-nots in the window. Someone put them there knowing that not everyone who walks past is celebrating.
That person is paying attention. In the flower business, as in most things, that turns out to be most of what’s required.