Business Profiles
York Flower Shop is blooming for Valentine's Day
By Virginia L. Woodwell
Valentine's Day is just a week away, and York Flower Shop owner Laura Kennedy is ready.
Photo by Virginia Woodwell
At the York Flower Shop, located right in the center of York Village, proprietor Laura Kennedy usually has one delivery truck on the road every day. Next week she'll have three. She'll have doubled her staff hours in advance of the day, and, by the time the day has passed, she'll have sold close to 2,000 roses - most of them red in accordance with popular demand, but some also in other colors, and many accompanying other cut-flower arrangements bearing the unique designer's stamp on which that shop strongly prides itself.
This year, Kennedy said, she's delighted that Valentine's Day falls on a Wednesday, right in the middle of the work week, because it provides a stronger chance of a timely delivery.
"The biggest challenge at Valentine's Day," she said, "is the weather. It's always cold, so our flowers are well-wrapped."
But problems arise with storms, of course, or simply with deliveries to houses where nobody is at home, she explained.
"We can't leave flowers outside in the cold for even a minute," she said.
So she's pleased at a growing trend on the part of the public to have flowers sent to individuals at their places of business, where there's always somebody there to receive them. And where that's not possible, she encourages senders to consider requesting a day-early delivery, to assure that the flowers will be there on the magical day.
"People are starting to understand," she reported.
Her own preparations for Valentine's Day begin with orders placed in early January. The orders for roses used to go out, she said, to growers in California and even locally in spots as close as Madbury, N.H. Over the last 15 years, however, she said, improvements in transportation an in other aspects of infrastructure have meant that South American growers "have completely taken over the rose-growing business." Now her roses come chiefly from Ecuador and Columbia, where, she said, cool mountain air at night and warm sun all day provide the perfect rose-growing medium. The resulting flowers, she added, are "strong, long-stemmed and long-lasting."
Kennedy orders 1,500 of them to start, then others as needed, most of the initial order in four varieties of red - bright red with a huge bloom, bright red with a smaller bloom, deep red with a slow-opening bloom and black-velvet red with a ruffled bloom.
Other rose colors popular with the public, Kennedy said, include yellow "for friendship" and peach, so she orders those, too, along with whites and hot pinks. Her own personal favorite, she added, is cream.
The York Flower Shop, however, cultivates variety and encourages choice, so additional offering available for Valentine's Day, Kennedy said, are tulips and spring flowers like hydrangeas and hyacinths, and orchids and narcissus, with flowering branches - in quince and pear, for example, coming from the Carolinas - also included.
That emphasis on variety coincides with another trend Kennedy noted: for women to send men flowers on Valentine's Day. For, while men, she said, "want to be on the safe side" and so choose the traditional dozen red roses, women tend to be more venturesome and pick exotics like orchids, or an arrangement that includes cymbidium and plum calla lilies arranged with blade grass.
Kennedy supports that kind of choice by stocking far more variety in blooms than the average florist, she said. On a daily basis, she explained, she has on hand over 30 varieties of flowers, bolstered by a comparable variety of foliages, grasses, and other plants critical to the work of the professional floral designer.
Kennedy herself is such a designer, as are at least two of the mainstays on her five-person staff: Christine Gambetta-Nunez, and Nicole Britton. Her other workers are Vairel MacGuire, Anne Cornell and Gretchen Gile. Lynn Curcio, Kennedy added, also sometimes fills in as a talented designer.
Gambetta-Nunez has been with Kennedy for eight years, and Britton for nine, and all, said Kennedy, are very passionate about their work.
"Everything we do," said Gambetta-Nunez, confirming Kennedy's statement, "is just a little bit different, right down to the vase or basket, the foliage, and the 'nuggets' we insert."
The nuggets, she explained, might be small, hand-crafted figures of butterflies or dragonflies, for example, or a bit of feather, and Kennedy displayed a swatch of long, fine feathers in blended hues of blue, maroon and scarlet to illustrate.
"We also know our customers," Kennedy said, and she was echoed by Gambetta-Nunez. "We remember their names and what colors and styles they like," they said, "and even details having to do with the placement of flowers in their homes."
That customer knowledge Kennedy called "a huge part of our service," and, by way of another illustration, she told the story of a recent order that came in to send a bouquet of lilies to a local couple in celebration of an anniversary. When Kennedy saw the order, she knew that the couple did not like lilies, so she called the sender back and was profusely thanked for recommending a more welcome substitute arrangement of spring flowers.
At the York Flower Shop, attention to customer service also extends, Kennedy said, to flowers being wired elsewhere. If the destination is Boston, where Kennedy is knowledgeable about who's available, she'll pick the shop. Elsewhere, she said, she'll "let the computer do the picking," but will let the shop that's picked "know what we expect" - not, that is, any commonplace arrangement involving "carnations, daisies, palms or babies breath," all of which the York Flower Shop eschews, but something like "a mound of spring flowers in vibrant hues," and she'll specify flowers to include.
"We get fussy for our customer," she said.
A Nashua, N.H. native, Kennedy said that she "always knew that I had an artistic, organic, side to me." She gardened with her dad as a child, then, right after high school, enrolled in the one-year course at Rittners School of Floral Design in Boston. She then worked for five years as head designer at Garrison Hill Greenhouses in Dover, N.H.
When changes in her personal life took her to Connecticut, she free-lanced there providing flower arrangements for weddings for 13 years, at the same time that she provided weekly flowers to a Chester, Conn., five-star restaurant.
When she returned to this area, she came to York because she'd come here as a child, and she found, for sale, a flower shop begun in the 1970s by Don Machum and his wife, Phyllis. Machum had moved the shop to its current site from a location out on Route 1 just two months before Kennedy bought it in 1994.
Now she says that she couldn't be more pleased with the shop's location. She likes the facts that she's right in the middle of the Village, and that people walk by regularly and feel free to stop in.
She hasn't stopped serving weddings. The York Flower Shop does, in fact, 150 a year, on average, capitalizing on York's and the region's popularity as a wedding site, and on the profusion of local facilities available to provide receptions.
But indeed, the weddings themselves may have their roots at this time of year, when Valentine's Day puts romance in the air.
The middle of February is, in any case, Laura Kennedy says, "just a good time of year to be receiving fresh flowers. That makes a lot of people very happy."
Kennedy is thinking of starting a class in floral arranging. If you're interested, stop in at the shop, or call her there at 363-5367.
The York Flower Shop is open from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday.
