Why out-of-season flowers cost more, and when it is worth paying

What in season actually means

In season is not a marketing word. It is a description of where a stem was standing a few days ago. A flower is in season when it has grown in the open, or under an unheated tunnel, at the point in the year its own biology wants to flower, in a region close enough that it reached the florist by road. Everything about that stem is cheap to produce: no lamps, no boiler, no aircraft, no long cold chain. The plant did the work and the weather paid for it.

The calendar belongs to the flower rather than to the shop, and it is narrower than most people expect. In the northern growing regions a peony flowers across May and June and then stops. A rose runs from May through to September. A chrysanthemum belongs to September, October and November, which is why it is the flower most bound up with autumn remembrance across much of Europe. Ask for any of them a season away from those months and somebody, somewhere, has had to manufacture the conditions.

The three things an out-of-season price is paying for

Out of season the flower still exists. Somebody is growing it somewhere, and the only question is what had to be spent to put it in front of you. Three costs sit behind almost every out-of-season premium, and they behave differently from one another.

• Heat and light. Forcing a crop outside its natural window means a heated glasshouse and supplementary lighting through short days, and energy is the largest variable cost most growers carry. When fuel prices move, the winter price of forced stems follows within weeks rather than seasons.
• Distance and the cold chain. The alternative to heating a glasshouse is to grow where the season is already right — high-altitude farms near the equator, in Kenya, Ecuador and Colombia, where daylength barely varies and the nights are cold — and then fly the stems to the market. Airfreight is charged by weight, flowers are wet and heavy, and every hour between the field and the bucket has to be held at a controlled temperature or the stem arrives with its life already spent.
• Grade and wastage. A forced crop yields shorter stems, smaller heads and a higher proportion that never makes grade at all. The grower has to recover that loss on the stems that do sell, so an out-of-season bunch is both dearer and, stem for stem, slighter than the same bunch in its own month.

There is a fourth thing, which is a mechanism rather than a cost. A great deal of the trade is priced at auction in the Netherlands rather than by a shopkeeper deciding what to charge, and an auction clock exists to find the price at which a scarce lot clears. Scarcity is converted into price immediately and without negotiation. That is why an out-of-season flower tends not to creep upward in price so much as step.

Sometimes it is demand, not the season

The most expensive rose of the year has almost nothing to do with growing conditions. Valentine's Day falls in the middle of winter, months before a rose would flower outdoors anywhere in the northern hemisphere, and it concentrates a very large share of the year's rose demand into about three days. Growers plan a year ahead for it, pinching and timing crops so the flush lands on exactly the right week. A crop that peaks seven days early is close to worthless.

Mother's Day behaves the same way, and so does Christmas in the countries that mark it with flowers. When you are quoted a high price in one of those weeks, heat and freight are only part of the answer: you are also paying the premium that a fixed date and a fixed national appetite reliably produce. That premium is unavoidable when the date is the whole point, and entirely avoidable when it is not. The same bouquet a fortnight later is a different price and, more often than not, a better bouquet.

The cost that does not appear on the invoice

Money is the visible half. The other half is vase life, and a good deal of it is spent before the flowers reach you. A cut stem begins ageing at the moment it is cut, and that clock does not pause for a lorry, an aircraft hold or a day standing in a wholesaler's chiller. A stem that has travelled a long way arrives with part of its life already gone, which is why the same flower can look identical in two buckets and behave completely differently on a kitchen table.

It matters most for the flowers that are short-lived to begin with. A peony gives around 5 days at its best and has a genuinely narrow natural season, so an out-of-season peony is a premium paid for a flower with less life left to lose. A tulip is much the same: it goes on growing after it is cut and it is already quick, so it has no spare margin to give up to a long journey. The flowers that travel well are the ones with a slower metabolism and a firmer stem, and a florist knows which those are without having to stop and think.

What to do instead of paying the premium

The useful move is almost never to pay more for the same flower. It is to change one variable and hold the rest still.

• Move the flower and keep the date. If the date cannot move, ask what is at its peak that week and let the arrangement be built around it rather than around your first thought. A florist's-choice bouquet made from the strongest thing in the market that morning will beat a forced version of the flower you had in mind, and cost less doing it.
• Move the date and keep the flower. If it is the flower itself that carries the meaning, send it in its own months. Tulips are a March-to-May flower and sunflowers a July-to-September one, and the gap between a stem in its season and the same stem out of it is not a subtle one.
• Buy in bud wherever the flower allows it. An iris bought in bud opens indoors within a day and gives you the whole of its display; the same stem bought open has already spent most of it. Out of season the temptation runs the other way, because open stems look like better value standing in the bucket, and they are not.

None of this is a counsel of thrift. There are occasions where the out-of-season flower is exactly right and the premium is worth every penny — a flower that meant something to somebody, on a date that cannot be moved. It is only worth knowing that what you are buying at that moment is scarcity rather than quality, so that you can decide which of the two you actually wanted.