28 July 2026 · Flowers and Places
Pick up a bunch of carnations or a box of roses in an American supermarket and there is a very good chance they were cut a few days ago on a plateau in the Andes, eight thousand feet up, and flown to Miami overnight. Colombia is one of the largest exporters of cut flowers in the world and the United States is by far its biggest customer.
That did not happen by accident, and it is not really about cheap labor, which is the usual assumption.
Three things line up there in a way they do almost nowhere else:
The result is a growing region that can crop continuously, at a quality that northern growers can only reach for part of the year and only with a great deal of energy.
The industry is younger than most people assume. It began in earnest in the late 1960s, on the back of American development work that was looking for export crops to offer Colombian agriculture as an alternative to coca. Flowers fit: high value for their weight, quick to crop, and a product the United States imports in enormous quantity.
Trade policy did the rest. A series of agreements from the early 1990s onward removed tariffs on Colombian and Ecuadorian flowers entering the United States, which made the arithmetic work permanently rather than seasonally. Within a couple of decades the center of gravity of the American cut flower trade had moved out of California and onto a plateau in South America.
Almost all of it lands in Miami. The cargo terminals there handle the overwhelming majority of flowers imported into the United States, and the whole operation is built around a cold chain that must not break: cut, graded and packed in Colombia, chilled, flown overnight, inspected, and moved into refrigerated trucks heading north.
Valentine's Day is the extreme version of this. In the run up, flower cargo flights into Miami increase enormously for a few weeks, and the entire year turns on those days going smoothly. A weather delay in February is not an inconvenience, it is a crop.
Mostly it means consistency. A Colombian rose is bred and grown to arrive looking identical to the last one, which is exactly what a supermarket needs and is a real achievement of the system.
It also means the trade off that shows up everywhere in this business. A flower selected to survive a plane, a customs hall and a truck is selected for durability rather than for scent or delicacy, and the things that do not survive shipping are the things that quietly disappear from the market. That is not a criticism of Colombian growing, which is excellent. It is what happens to any product that has to travel three thousand miles before anybody looks at it.
If you want the other thing, the answer is the same as it always is: buy from somebody growing near you, in the months when they have it.
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