next monday is valentine’s day. no, i don’t do valentine’s flowers, but i’m really terribly flattered that you asked. alright, now that that’s out of the way, here’s some food for thought about valentine’s flowers.

• back in the olden days, when we were too shy for bad pickup lines, hormonal youngsters send coded messages via bouquets of flowers. different flowers held different meanings or stood for different kinds of affection. and you thought it was hard to convey tone through a text message.
• valentine’s day and mother’s day are the two holidays with the most demand for flowers, with mother’s day in the lead. as it was once put to me, “everybody has a mother; not everybody has a girlfriend.”
• there’s something of a rose shortage this year. savvy shoppers will order flowers in advance and get something gorgeous that isn’t red roses. that gets you the best value, nicest flowers, and if your ladyfriend is like me, brownie points for being “different.”
• even florists like getting flowers, but we may secretly critique the design. it’s nothing personal, darling, we know you didn’t arrange them.
• if your sweetheart is out of town, or perhaps you’d like to send a valentine to your grandmother (for even more brownie points), please please pretty please with sugar on top take the time to find and call a local florist in her town. order gatherers that claim to deliver nationwide or–even worse–pose as local flower shops take a cut from what you pay them and have no idea what the local florist has in stock. how do you know if a florist is local? take the time to call them and speak to a real live person. if you’re determined to look online, find their google place page and check out the reviews and the map to their real local flower shop. you want to spend money on lavish gifts for your true love, not on the call center for the middle man, right? for more info on this subject, check out the detectives.

i hope you have a fabulously romantic valentine’s day!