Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

"It’s important that the roses be picked at the right point. It’s different for each variety, but if you pick them too early, they’ll never open. Too late, they’ll be open too much by the time the customer gets them."

Wednesday 10:00 a.m. Filtered, silvery light and thick, warm air make the greenhouse feel like a huge, rose-filled aquarium. Automatically controlled cooling fans roar in one corner. Clonelike ranks of plants — dark green, tight-budded, long-stemmed — fill the south end of the two-acre building. Opened buds of yellows, pinks, and whites line one wall. Another half-acre of unfurling blooms drifts under shade cloth beside the greenhouse. Workers harvest larkspur from the three-acre field-flower garden. Sunfresh Floral, in a small valley in northern San Marcos, has supplied roses to the retail market for two generations. Frank Bons, son of the founder, now runs the operation. He seems unconcerned about the new housing development that looms ominously on the ridge across the road from the family farm.

Frank and his small staff are busy. It’s four days before Mother’s Day, the beginning of the year’s biggest flower-selling season, what with proms, graduations, weddings, mothers and grandparents and secretaries days filling the spring and summer months. The lanky, easygoing Bons, with an air of surfer about him, shifts his attention from overseeing tubs of pale-raspberry buds being readied for market.

“Most of the varieties of roses grown by commercial growers are bred for greenhouses. They wouldn’t do nearly so well outside. We can control the timing of the bloom through temperature so they are just at the right point for picking when we need them.

“The public wants a certain color at a certain time of year. For example, white and pink are popular in the spring, for the wedding season, May, June, July. Golds and salmons are popular in fall, and reds sell well in winter. If a grower has only white flowers, he can sell them great from May to July, but the rest of the year, they’re not very popular. He has to adjust his production so he can afford to sell only a small portion. I like to say Sunfresh grows every color of roses but green, blue, and brown. There actually are some brown roses out there, but they’re not very good.

“Outdoor roses get a rest every winter, but because we can control the temperature, we get greenhouse roses to bloom all year round. So we have to replace our root stock every five, six, seven years to keep the quality high.

“And it’s important that the roses be picked at just the right point. It’s different for each variety, but if you pick them too early, when they’re not opened up enough, they’ll never open. Too late, they’ll be open too much by the time the customer gets them, and they won’t sell as a premium rose. The pickers have to look at each bloom of each variety to make sure it’s just right. We try to have a 48-hour window from greenhouse to customer. It’s a never-ending business. We harvest twice a day, every day of the year.”

Three of Frank’s workers stand at wooden benches, deftly trimming stems and leaves from harvested roses, wrapping each dozen in cellophane cones with “Sunfresh Floral” printed in white script. The flowers go quickly into white plastic tubs to keep water flowing up the stem and into the bud. Left out of water too long, the water-uptake stream is broken, and the buds will droop and die. Each frosty -pink bloom is just beginning to flare at the top. The leaves are a glossy green.

Wednesday, 1:00 p.m. Frank loads buckets of pastel roses and blue larkspurs into his truck and drives to the San Diego Flower Auction, near the ranunculus fields and Palomar Airport Road in Carlsbad. He hoists the buckets onto a four-foot-long, two-tiered hand cart and affixes a large white plastic card with a black “238” on it, which he’s pulled from a box just inside the warehouse doors. At the auction office he fills out a form: grower identification number, flower varieties, quantities, and cart number. He leaves a copy at the office, affixes one to the cart, and heads back to his greenhouses.

Thursday, 6:00 a.m. The 130,000-square-foot auction warehouse is damp and chilled, rich with the full, green, earthy smell of growing things. Franks pink roses, squeezed into their cellophane collars, look virtually unchanged. The Sun-fresh cart is now one of 60 or so crowded onto the concrete floor outside the auction room, each with a large black-and-white number and grower’s receipt. Local floral retailers who make up most of this morning's buyers grab free coffee and inspect the blooms, making notes on their clipboards in preparation for the bidding. The carts overflow with dozens of varieties of flowers and greens, from baby’s breath to gladiolus and sunflowers. Roses attract a lot of attention today.

The San Diego County Flower and Plant Auction is a nine-year-old growers’ co-op to which member growers bring their crops for direct purchase by retailers or by wholesalers who ship them around the country. Previously, local florists bought from the trucks of roving jobbers who bought from the gardens, all of which added time and expense to the system.

At 6:30 a.m., about two dozen buyers, who’ve also registered at the office and received their own numbered cards, take up spots in the rows of tiered seats in the glare of the steeply raked auction room. It’s a reverse auction, a Dutch auction. The auctioneer announces the grower, flower variety, and quantity available and starts a lighted tote board that automatically ticks down the price. When it reaches a predetermined price, the bidding is closed, and the auctioneer moves on to the next lot of flowers. Retailers can pause the countdown at a price they like, raise their cards, and claim some or all of the lot, then the price continues down. The first (highest) bidder has the advantage of first choice from that particular batch of flowers. After the auction, unsold items go back onto the main floor for purchase at higher fixed prices by retailers who don’t make it to the early-morning bidding.

Workers haul in cart after cart of tulips, baby’s breath, daisies, greens, orchids. Bidding is brisk on the roses. Frank Bons’s pinks are claimed by a stocky man in a navy-blue T-shirt with a Pizza Hut logo over the pocket. He gathers buckets of roses, larkspur, myrtle, ferns, tulips. By 8:00 a.m., they’re loaded into a white van.

At 8:45 a.m., the pink roses are in the crowded upstairs workroom of Nanelle’s Flowers and Orchids in Rancho Bernardo. Stems are stripped of thorns and lower leaves, and the outer layer of guard petals are removed from the still barely opened buds. With newly trimmed stems, the roses are plunged into a bath of Floralife for an hour to freshen the blooms, then into a bucket of clean water and deposited in the cooler.

Friday, 8:00 a.m. Forty-eight hours after they were cut from the Sunfresh fields, the dozen buds, now unfurled enough to suggest their raspberry-pink throats, are arranged in a vase, looking like a spray of rosy fireworks. The buds float on a billow of silvery blue-lavender caspia, pale blue larkspur, and fern.

Clerks and flower arrangers have been in the shop for an hour. The phone rings constantly. Nanelle Miller, a brisk, businesslike strawberry blond, scans a new batch of blooms from today’s auction, checks to see if the computerized ordering system is up and running (it crashed the day before), and confirms with a clerk taking a phone order that, yes, they can have a potted rose bush delivered in Cleveland.

“This is definitely our busiest season. We’ve been planning all week for this. Making sure we have enough Oasis and myrtle, ferns, all the greenery and vases. We’re trying to get customers to spread deliveries out over the weekend, not just on Sunday. Valentine’s Day is harder. Everyone wants their flowers delivered on the 14th.” As she talks, she dodges clerks and customers in the narrow shop jammed with orchid sprays, Hawaiian exotics, gladiolus, ivy topiaries, cards, and balloons beside the walk-in coolers.

8:15 a.m. Mel and Lee Braun, dapper seniors from Rancho Bernardo, appear in the shop doorway, looking for Nanelle. Mel ushers Lee through the narrow aisle, his hand on her elbow. “The Brauns. We’re here for our deliveries,” Mel says. “You’ve got Rancho Peñasquitos today,” Nanelle says, handing the pair a list of addresses. On special occasions like Mother’s Day, when the shop can have dozens of deliveries to make in a day, part-timers are recruited to help. “We do this to make a little extra money for gifts for the grandkids,” Mel says. “And just to stay busy.”

In a vacant shop next door to Nanelle’s, Dave presides over an array of 60 numbered arrangements scheduled for delivery today. He shows Mel and Lee the dozen on their list, and they begin loading the arrangements into their compact car. Their license plate reads “LOVECAME.” Lee checks her Thomas Brothers street guide for their first delivery — the dozen pink roses from Sunfresh.

In an apartment complex in a eucalyptus-shaded corner of Rancho Peñasquitos, Lee points Mel to a parking space and checks her list. “With apartment deliveries, first you have to check in with the manager to make sure the name and address are correct and to get directions so you don’t waste a lot of time wandering around looking for the place. Sometimes these complexes can be confusing.”

They find number 264 and climb a stairway deep in the cool, sun-dappled block. Lee balances the pink roses care-fully, juggling a purse and her delivery list, ready for the presentation. The doot is opened by a blond, athletic-looking woman who smiles broadly when she sees the gift. “Oh, they’re beautiful! They’re for my daughter, Jolene. From her husband. He’s in Navy flight training in Florida right now.” A tow-headed two-year- old boy watches quietly from the living room couch. “She’s a nurse. She’s working a double shift today, so she won’t see these for a while.”

“They need water,” Lee admonishes. “And happy Mother’s Day.” The pink roses find a home on the coffee table, the first thing Jolene will see when she walks in the door at midnight.