The vast majority of the year, New York’s Flower Market is at its most bustling during the morning, as international shipments arrive and people from all sides of the industry do their early morning shopping.
Last night was a rare exception: A Rose by Harvest hosted their annual Rose Fest on Tuesday and Wednesday, with last night being the date of their cocktail reception. The entire store was filled with hundreds of unique breeds of roses of virtually every color, shape, and size imaginable. We manage our fair share of roses at L’Atelier Rouge, but the sheer breadth of rose species on display was overwhelming. Roses are much, much more diverse flowers than we realize-there’s a lot more to roses besides the reds and whites or yellows you might see for sale at a corner store or bodega. Roses are one of the world’s most popular flowers for a reason: with this amount of variation, it’s hard to not be inspired by all they have to offer when designing an arrangement.
Seeing all of the breeds of roses was exciting on its own, but A Rose by Harvest had another display with entirely unique flowers-experimental strains that haven’t even been named yet. They distributed rating sheets where they asked attendees to give our feedback on the many different new roses still being tweaked. I included pictures of a few of my favorites below-I’m especially partial the two at the top with the green buds in the middle; they’re so outside of what I normally associate with roses, more like a crossbreed with a Ranunculus, as were many of the roses with the tight, leafy centers. There was huge variation across the entire shop in terms of petal shape and size; some sporting more triangular petals somewhat similar to those on a Magnolia or Dahlia.
The “official” roses were just as interesting. And these are just a fraction of what they had in the shop:
Edith
These have the textured Ranunculus-like center and come in a range of soft pastels befitting of their somewhat genteel namesake.
Gravity
Beautiful gradation from pale green to white to pink in the center. A sort of funny, cabbage-like texture.
Constance
Very similar to those Ranunculus or even Peonies, these would perfect for Spring.
Sparkling Graffiti + Fire Works
More of that speckled coloring I found so exciting and varying shades of reds and burgundies.
Black Baccara
These are fairly similar to more traditional roses, but were really striking for the “peach fuzz” (non-technical terms) on the petals.
Pink Floyd
A bold, almost pungent color-and they’re enormous. Not positive if there’s any tangible tie between the rose and the band, but I can keep investigating.
Roxy
Giant, coiled petals with more of that soft ombre. It reminded me of an old Stevie Wonder album cover, too…
Green Eye
One of the smallest roses on display-again, that unexpected Ranunculus-like center. The contrast is so striking between the green and white. The name is pretty on-the-nose.
Many thanks to A Rose by Harvest for putting on such an amazing event for the whole floral community (and for letting me lurk around taking pictures for a half hour).
There are even more photos of the rose displays on the L’Atelier Rouge Facebook page!
À bientôt..!
— Alex Miller