Where Your Flowers Actually Come From

A plain-language tour of the cut-flower supply chain — who grows what, how it reaches Central Florida, and why buying local here means greens and tropicals rather than roses in February.

Almost every conversation we have about floral budget eventually arrives at the same question, usually phrased as a complaint: why does the same arrangement cost one number in October and a different number in February? The answer is not florist margin. It is a supply chain that runs through two countries, one airport, and a cold chain that starts failing the moment somebody props a cooler door open.

If you are new to this industry, understanding that chain is the fastest way to stop being surprised by your own quotes.

Roughly four in five stems are imported

As of 2023, close to 80% of the cut flowers sold in the United States were grown somewhere else. In calendar year 2024, US cut-flower imports hit a record $1.98 billion. That is the baseline fact that shapes everything downstream: pricing, lead time, variety availability, and how much of your sustainability story you can actually document.

Two countries do most of the work. Colombia supplied more than 60% of 2024 imports at $1.24 billion; Ecuador supplied 25% at $491 million. Together with the rest of the region, Latin America accounted for about 92% of what came in. Both origins have grown fast — Colombian imports nearly doubled between 2020 and 2024, and Ecuadorian imports rose more than two and a half times over the same period.

Why those two countries

It is geography, not policy. Equatorial latitude gives consistent day length year-round, so there is no dormant season to plan around. High altitude gives cool nights, which slows respiration and produces the heavy heads and long straight stems that the rose and carnation markets pay for. Add decades of accumulated expertise, established freight lanes, and enormous scale, and you get a supply base no temperate region can match on cost or consistency.

The cold chain, and where it breaks

A stem cut on a Colombian farm on Monday can be in a Central Florida cooler by Wednesday. Whether it still has ten days of vase life left depends entirely on how few times the chain warmed up along the way.

1. Harvest and pre-cool. Field heat has to come out fast. Every hour warm is vase life spent.
2. Dry pack. Most imported flowers travel dry in boxes, not in water — lighter, cheaper, and fine if the temperature holds.
3. Air freight, usually into Miami. The overwhelming majority of Latin American flowers enter the US through Miami, where Customs and Border Protection agricultural specialists inspect shipments for pests before release. Peak seasons around Valentine’s Day put enormous volume through that one point.
4. Wholesaler cooler, then you. Rehydration, processing, and grading happen here.

Ocean freight is a growing share of that traffic. It is cheaper and carries a materially lower carbon load per stem, but transit runs weeks rather than days, so it only works for varieties hardy enough to survive the trip. If your quote came in unusually low, it is worth asking which way the flowers travelled.

What “buy local” actually means in Florida

Here is where a lot of well-intentioned sourcing language goes wrong. Florida is not a minor player in this industry — it leads the country. Florida’s floriculture sales reached $1.2 billion in 2023, ahead of California at $983 million and Michigan at $695 million, with roughly 99.4 million square feet in cut-flower production.

But Florida’s strength is not temperate cut flowers. It is foliage, tropicals, palms, potted material, orchids, and cut greens. So when a client asks for locally grown florals in February, the honest answer has two halves:

• Genuinely local and abundant: tropical foliage, palms, monstera and ti leaf, ferns, bromeliads, anthurium, ginger, potted and living material, and a great deal of the greenery that gives an installation its volume.
• Not realistically local: garden roses in winter, tulips, peonies out of season, ranunculus, and most of the temperate palette that dominates Pinterest boards.

The design move, then, is to build volume and structure from material that genuinely grows here and spend the imported budget on focal flowers where the variety actually matters. That is a better story than a vague local-sourcing claim, and it is one you can defend when someone asks for specifics.

Five questions worth asking your wholesaler

1. Which farm? Not which country — which farm. A wholesaler who can name it is a wholesaler with a relationship.
2. What is the harvest date? This is the number that predicts vase life, not the delivery date.
3. Air or ocean? Changes both the carbon math and how much life is left in the stem.
4. Any certification, and covering what? Florverde Sustainable Flowers, Rainforest Alliance, and MPS each audit a different scope. “Certified” alone tells you nothing.
5. What is the realistic substitution? Ask before you need it. Every experienced buyer has a substitution plan in their head before the order goes in.

If you are just starting out

Learn processing before you learn design. Learn what a properly hydrated stem feels like, how a cooler should smell, what botrytis looks like early, and how much vase life you lose by leaving a box on a warm dock for an hour. Design skill is visible and gets attention; product knowledge is invisible and is what keeps a client. Anyone can specify a garden rose. Knowing whether that rose survives eight hours outdoors in Orlando in July is the job.