

It can be a jarring experience, spending part of the day listening to the grim details of a murder trial at the Spokane County Superior Court, only to finish out the evening surrounded by a colorful array of floral arrangements with kind messages attached to them. Occasionally, those worlds collide when our sympathy arrangements begin to reflect the names in the obituary section. When I’m not working at my “day job” as a breaking news and public safety reporter, I am often working at the flower shop. Hanlon and Mae are just two people with whom I work at one of Rose and Blossom’s two locations, near Gonzaga on Sharpe Avenue in a former restaurant. “What we’re doing is giving people happiness. At the end of the day, would she want to do anything different? Definitely not. It can be stressful and exhausting but that’s the case for most creative work, Hanlon said. The flowers are trimmed and slotted into arrangements before being stored in a climate-controlled staging area before their delivery. Buckets of flowers are hauled into the shop by the dozens.
#FLORAL DESIGNER JOBS DRIVERS#
New faces fill the shop as florists and delivery drivers are hired on a temporary basis for the holiday rush. There are deadlines to meet, phone calls to answer, orders to fill, flowers to process, buckets to wash, floors to sweep and so much more that builds up to a fever pitch this time of year.


Mae then inserts a custom combination of flowers into the greenery, creating a series of overlapping geometric patterns.Īt a nearby workstation, Jaisy Hanlon, another florist, gives a freshly completed arrangement a light spritz of floral spray to help the arrangement last longer before it goes out the next morning. Jessica Mae, a florist at Rose and Blossom in the Logan neighborhood, is humming to a song playing in the background on a recent day as she cuts various greenery branches and locates them into a new vase, building the lattice work of interlocking stems that form the base layer of an arrangement. But for florists, farmers and delivery drivers, the occasion could not be more real. 14, Valentine’s Day.Ī YouGov poll from 2021 showed that fewer than one-third of Americans (28%) believe Valentine’s Day is celebrated as a “real” holiday. In Spokane County, they all wind up in the hands of lovers, friends and family members on Feb. The boxes of stems are shipped from farms all over. It’s mid-February and the flowers are coming in by the thousands.
