Where Do Roses Come From Anyway? (2024)

Phrases like “farm to table” and “locavore” have become all the rage when talking about food. We hear a lot about buying local and fret about supply chain distances. But where do roses come from?

As you pay inflated prices for long-stemmed roses for your sweetheart this weekend, it may make you feel a little better knowing how far those fragile flowers have come. There’s a good chance they were on a truck, then a plane, then another truck or two, all the way from the Equator. Or as they say in Spanish, Ecuador.

Roses aren’t the leading export from Ecuador since they don’t pull in as much money as other crops like bananas, coffee, or cocoa. The country actually makes more from petroleum and shrimp too. But if you tour through the High Valley near Otavalo, you’ll see greenhouse after greenhouse that is filled with roses of every color. Some estimates peg Ecuador as the largest rose producer in the world (with Colombia also vying for the top spot) and it certainly has some of the world’s largest plantations.

Ecuador’s fame as having some of the best commercial roses in the world stems partly (pun intended) from the fact that roses in this Andean landscape receive constant and consistent sunlight almost every day of the year. The high altitude of the areas where they are grown offers intense solar radiation that forces the roses to grow thicker and more resilient, while cooler evening temperatures mean a longer development period allowing these roses to sometimes grow to six feet high!

The Process of Growing and Shipping Roses

I got to tour through one of Ecuador’s many rose greenhouses when I was there on one of my trips to the country, a side visit to on the way to the obligatory trip to the Otavalo weekend market. I wasn’t really expecting much, but then I got there and was flabbergasted. There are rows and rows of roses of white, then go one building over and it’s rows and rows of pink. Then black, red, and striped combinations.

A whole army of workers buzzed around spraying, cutting, cleaning, transporting, and packaging. Carts are pushed around an elaborate system of overhead tracks that looks like a kiddie amusem*nt park ride to move the flowers from building to building. There are a lot of steps in this process before the package roses head out to the airport for export.

All of this needs to happen fast after the flowers reach maturity. The whole journey from cutting the flower to it appearing on some lucky guy or gal’s desk needs to happen in just a few days. Every day after the stem is cut, the flowers lose 15% of their value. If a delay knocks off a few days, the value can drop to nothing.

The packing and storage happen in refrigerated rooms and the flowers move to the Quito airport on refrigerated trucks. They are whisked off in a plane to the U.S. or Europe, sometimes auctioned off in an air-conditioned warehouse, then loaded into more refrigerated trucks on the other end to get to distribution points. Finally, they hit the florist’s shop and the journey will be almost done. Or they’ll go to an online florist and another trip via FedEx is still needed. It’s a fraught process as described in this Planet Money podcast, and every little detail must work out in order for you to get your roses by Valentine’s Day.

The whole process requires plenty of coordination and project management and naturally, there’s plenty of inherent risk. What if a landslide keeps the trucks from getting to Quito? What happens if a snowstorm hits in February and flights can’t land in the cities? In a sense, when you buy those roses you are paying for much more than flowers. You are paying for lots of risk and lots of fuel. Oh, and pesticides of course. There are some organic rose growers, but not many. Like most items in the florist’s shop, roses are highly manipulated plants.

Which Other Countries Grow Long-stemmed Roses?

Where do roses come from? In the Americas, that’s mostly Ecuador and Colombia. But they are not the only growers in the game. Another equatorial country, Kenya, has become one of the world’s top exporters of cut roses, mainly to the European Union, where they provide almost 40% of cut roses.

They are also working hard to increase their foothold in massive markets like China and India. Shorter transportation times to those countries mean they have a bit of an edge over South America, even if Kenya’s overall infrastructure doesn’t meet the levels of Latino growers.

Another African nation, Ethiopia, has also become a top supplier of roses. The Netherlands still has the lock on the rose market worldwide in its role as the flower crossroads, with some 40% of the flowers sold in the world going through that country. But according to the BBC, the 1970s oil crisis caused much of the world’s actual flower production to move south, where warmer climates and cheaper labor attracted the industry.

The Long History of Roses

The rose is one of the world’s oldest flowers, found in cave paintings, fossils, and tombs going back at least 5,000 years. A few of my favorite trivia bits from this great history article from the University of Missouri:

First, the long-stemmed rose as we know it is a relatively modern development.

A landmark achievement in rose breeding occurred in the mid-19th century when tea roses were crossed with hybrid perpetuals to give us the modern hybrid tea rose. Replete with their large flowers available in a palette of colors and their vigorous plants with glossy, green foliage, they are the most popular type of rose in the world today.

Most scholars think that roses originated in Central Asia, then made their way around a few different continents in the thousands of years following as civilizations spread. Ironically, the countries now growing the greatest quantities of roses hadn’t even seen one until the Colombian Exchange started happening in the 1500s.

The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all loved roses, to the point of excess some would say.

So insatiable was the demand for roses that peasants often were forced to grow them instead of food just to satisfy the Roman aristocracy.

Next, of course one of the first things the Christians dubbed as sinful was the rose flower. They said it was a pagan symbol and no person of God should plant it. Everyone ignored them, of course, starting a long tradition of people ignoring what priests and ministers said to do while nodding their heads in agreement.

The Environmental Cost of All That Rose Shipping

Unless you are growing prize roses in your own garden, they are not exactly a “low impact” purchase. If you are in the northern hemisphere, giving roses for Valentine’s Day is nothing close to being a “green gift.” With the cost and pollution of fossil fuel, chemicals used in production, and the many squabbles over labor conditions in greenhouses worldwide, there’s a valid reason why some tree huggers are not cut flower fans.

Since cocoa also has to be shipped from ideal climates far away, with its own labor issues for what’s not sold as fair trade, the green party poopers will probably rule chocolates out too. Hey, even the sexy lingerie is probably shipped across an ocean from some sweatshop in China, Bangladesh, or Vietnam.

Maybe a nice dinner instead, at a restaurant that serves locally sourced food? To follow, there’s that other Valentine’s Day tradition that’s free, but it requires a very warm bedroom, so maybe let’s just forget being eco-friendly for a day and enjoy the moment.