Where Do Flowers Actually Come From? A Former Florist Explains
Most people don't think about where flowers come from. You walk into a shop, or order online, and there they are: fresh, fragrant, and seemingly conjured from somewhere pleasant and nearby. The reality is considerably more interesting than that, and considerably more global.
I spent over a decade behind a flower shop counter and I can tell you that the journey those roses took to get to you is one of the more remarkable logistical stories in all of modern agriculture. It involves high-altitude farms in South America, a single airport in Florida, refrigerated cargo planes, customs inspections, and occasionally, a gecko.
We'll get to the gecko later.
The Short Answer: Mostly South America
About 80% of all cut flowers sold in the United States are imported. If you've bought flowers in America in the last thirty years, there is an overwhelming chance they were grown somewhere in Latin America, most likely Colombia or Ecuador.
More than 60% of US cut flower imports come from Colombia, and a further 25% come from Ecuador. Latin American countries produce 92% of total US flower imports. The Netherlands plays a role too, but Canada and the Netherlands together represent only about 5% of US imports.
This wasn't always the case. For most of American history, flowers were grown domestically, primarily in California, Florida, and the Pacific Northwest. What changed was a combination of economics, climate, and, interestingly, US drug policy.
Why Colombia and Ecuador?
The answer is geography and something the flower industry calls the "eternal spring."
Colombia and Ecuador have near ideal production conditions. With average temperatures ranging from 55°F to 65°F, the main cut flower growing regions are often referred to as the "eternal land of spring." Mountainous terrain in both countries creates optimal growing conditions, characterized by warm days and cool nights.
This means year-round growing without the energy costs of heated greenhouses. A rose grown at high altitude in Bogotá gets warm equatorial sun during the day and cool mountain nights that slow its development just enough to produce a tighter, longer-lasting bloom. It's genuinely better growing territory for cut flowers than most of the United States.
The other factor was policy. In 1991, Congress passed the Andean Trade Preference Act, a law that eliminated tariffs on several goods from Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru. The aim was to shift these nations away from the illicit drug trade and toward legitimate industries. The impact was almost instant. In the two years following, rose imports from Colombia grew over 30 percent.
Three decades later the industry is enormous. Colombia exports flowers to over 100 destinations, and the majority go to the United States. Colombia provides about 1.5 billion stems annually, grown on about 8,600 hectares of farmland near Bogotá and harvested by about 100,000 rural workers.
One brand worth knowing if you're on the consumer end of this supply chain is Roses del Fuego, which sources exclusively from Ecuador's high-altitude growing regions. The same conditions that make Ecuador ideal for commercial flower production, the cool mountain nights, the equatorial light, the rich volcanic soil, are what Roses del Fuego has built their entire operation around. The result is a long-stemmed rose with noticeably more presence than what you'll typically find at a grocery store or from a mass-market shipper. Worth knowing about if the occasion calls for something that actually looks like it came from somewhere.
The Race Against Time
Once a flower is cut, the clock starts. Everything that happens after that is a race to get it to you before it knows it's dying.
Flowers harvested in the morning in Colombia can be on sale in Florida by the afternoon. That turnaround happens because of one place: Miami International Airport.
About 90% of Valentine's Day roses arrive at Miami International Airport via 30 to 35 daily chartered wide-body flights from Colombia and Ecuador. Miami's airport handles more perishable cargo than any other airport in the United States, and flowers are the centerpiece of that operation. The entire facility has cold storage infrastructure built around the flower trade.
From Miami, flowers move by refrigerated truck to wholesalers and distributors across the country. From distributors to local florists. From florists to you. The whole chain from Bogotá farm to your doorstep can happen in under 48 hours.
When I worked at the shop, this is what Valentine's week looked like from the inside: pallets. Dozens of them. Boxes stacked to the ceiling, all refrigerated, all moving fast. The volume before Valentine's Day and Mother's Day was staggering. We'd take in more flowers in a single week than most of the year combined.
The Gecko Story
Here's what nobody tells you about flowers imported from tropical farms.
They don't always arrive alone.
The warm, humid conditions in Colombian and Ecuadorian greenhouses are hospitable to more than roses. Bugs, small insects, the occasional larger passenger. The inspectors at Miami's customs operation do their best: Customs and Border Protection reports inspecting over 1.23 billion flowers at the airport and intercepting nearly 2,000 pests, mostly thrips, moths, and caterpillars.
Mostly. Not entirely.
At the shop, we'd regularly open boxes to find stowaways that had made the journey north. Bugs were common. But the real discovery was the geckos (just like the little animated gecko in the GEICO commercials). Small, quick, and very much alive after their long refrigerated trip from South America. We got good at catching them. And once you've caught a gecko, you need to feed it. The bugs that arrived in the same shipment were, it turned out, a self-contained ecosystem. The geckos ate the bugs. We kept the geckos.
A flower shop with a resident gecko population is considerably more interesting than one without.
What About the Netherlands?
The Netherlands deserves its own mention because it operates differently from Colombia and Ecuador. Rather than being primarily a grower, it's primarily a hub.
The Netherlands is the largest producer of cut flowers in the world and a key importer of cut flowers from developing countries. Currently, 45% of world flower trade transits or is facilitated via the Netherlands. The Aalsmeer Flower Auction is considered the flower trade capital of the world.
The Aalsmeer auction is worth understanding. It operates on a "Dutch auction" system where prices start high and drop until a buyer claims the lot. Thousands of transactions happen every morning before most of Europe has finished breakfast. Flowers from Kenya and Ethiopia arrive in Amsterdam, get auctioned, and redistribute across Europe. It's one of the largest commercial buildings in the world by footprint.
Dutch tulips, which you might assume are grown in the Netherlands, often are. The Dutch bulb industry is genuinely local and genuinely world-leading. But much of what passes through Aalsmeer originated somewhere warmer.
What About American Flowers?
Domestic flower growing is alive, though it represents a smaller share of the market than most people realize. The lead producers of flowers in the US include California, Washington, New Jersey, Oregon, Hawaii, North Carolina, and Florida.
California dominates domestic production, particularly for flowers that don't ship as well internationally. Locally grown flowers have been having a moment in recent years, partly driven by consumer interest in knowing where things come from and partly by florists who discovered during the pandemic that local supply chains were more reliable than international ones.
If you want American-grown flowers specifically, your best bet is a local florist who sources regionally, a farmers market flower vendor, or a community supported agriculture flower subscription. The flowers are often more unusual and more seasonal, which has its own appeal.
What the Tariffs Mean for Your Bouquet Right Now
If you've noticed flowers costing a little more lately, you're not imagining it. The trade policy changes of the past year have hit the floral industry in ways that are still working their way through the supply chain.
Here's what happened. Until recently, Colombian flowers entered the US tariff-free under the US-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement signed in 2012. As of April 2025, a sweeping 10% global tariff eliminated that arrangement. Colombian flowers, once completely exempt from import fees, now face a flat 10% increase.
Ecuador's situation is more complicated. Ecuador had already been subject to a 6.8% tariff since 2013, and the new tariffs stack on top of that existing rate, bringing the effective cost to around 17%. Since Colombia and Ecuador together supply over 85% of US cut flower imports, that's not a small thing for anyone buying or selling flowers in America.
There was also a brief and genuinely alarming moment earlier in 2025 when the Trump administration threatened Colombia specifically with tariffs as high as 25% in response to a dispute over deportation flights. Industry experts had predicted price hikes of up to 20% if those tariffs had gone into effect, which would have significantly affected florists, wholesalers, and consumers alike. That particular standoff was resolved when Colombia agreed to resume accepting deportees, but it illustrated just how exposed the US flower industry is to diplomatic tensions with its primary suppliers.
The price impact at consumer level has been real but not dramatic so far. Florists are reporting at least a 10% increase passing through to customers. A single rose that was $7.99 is now closer to $9.99. In 2025 many businesses absorbed a significant portion of the added cost rather than passing it on entirely.
Has the sourcing actually shifted? Not meaningfully yet. The same farms in Colombia and Ecuador are still growing the vast majority of American flowers. The domestic industry simply lacks the scale and infrastructure to replace Colombia's output, and you can't build a greenhouse industry overnight. Local flower farmers stand to benefit in the long term as imported flowers become more expensive, but meeting that demand is a serious challenge. As one domestic grower put it plainly: you can't try to drive business back to this country while not helping farmers be ready for it.
What this means practically: the flowers you buy are coming from the same places they always have. They're just costing a little more to get here, and that cost is increasingly showing up in what you pay at the shop or online.
What This Means for the Flowers You Buy
The roses you send as an apology, the birthday bouquet, the anniversary flowers: they almost certainly started their lives on a farm in the mountains outside Bogotá or in Ecuador's Cayambe region, were cut by hand before dawn, driven to an airport, flown to Miami, inspected by federal agents, distributed by truck, and arrived at a florist within 48 hours of leaving the ground.
That's not a reason to feel strange about them. It's a reason to appreciate both the flower and the infrastructure that got it to you. An enormous amount of human effort goes into the thing sitting in a vase on your kitchen table.
The best thing you can do with that knowledge is use it. Know what you're giving. Choose it with intention. Pair it with something real to say.
And if you need a place to start on what different flowers actually mean, the apology flowers guide covers the full range. The flowers that mean love guide is worth a read too. And if you're buying flowers because you owe someone an apology and you're not sure how big a gesture the situation calls for, the Screw-Up Calculator exists for exactly that problem.
About the Author:
Rose has been surrounded by flowers her entire life — and yes, that's her real name, which tells you everything you need to know about how this all turned out. She spent the better part of the 1990s running her own flower shop, which means she's forgotten more about flowers than most people will ever know. She writes about them the way she always worked with them — straight, practical, and with zero patience for fluff.
