For the past five years, Molly Culver, owner of Molly Oliver Flowers in Brooklyn, has mounted a quiet battle against the goliath of Valentine’s Day flowers: the rose. Classically red, multilayered, prickly and velvety, millions of roses, most imported from overseas, will be sold for the annual day of love. But Ms. Culver is among the growing number of florists and flower enthusiasts who want to know: Would you consider tulips instead?
Consumers in the United States are expected to spend nearly $3 billion on flowers for the holiday this year, according to the National Retail Federation. Most of that will be spent on roses, but there are signs that the tulip, more commonly associated with spring and Mother’s Day, has emerged in recent years as a surprising and more sustainable alternative.
At UrbanStems, an online flower retailer, the choice of tulips in February is “catching on really fast,” said Meenakshi Lala, the chief executive.
UrbanStems, which began offering tulips for Valentine’s Day in 2021, expects to sell twice as many tulips this Valentine’s Day as it did last year.
“We are expecting to reach upwards of 4,000 tulip orders this Valentine’s Day cycle,” she said, noting that the cycle is “typically six to seven days.”
And while that number is dwarfed by how many roses the company expects to sell (1.8 million stems), it’s not exactly a fair comparison. UrbanStems uses roses of various prices and arrangements, almost the way a painter would use a shade of blue. But the tulip bouquets are just that — premium tulips.
Tulips also tend to be less expensive than roses. At a Trader Joe’s in New York on the day before Valentine’s, a bouquet of 20 tulips costs $12.99, while a dozen roses were $14.99. At POSY, a New York City-based floral design studio, an arrangement with 30 tulips can go for $100 and an arrangement of 24 red roses is priced at $175. That relative affordability might have something to do with the popularity of tulips beyond Valentine’s Day: They are the most-purchased flower in the United States.
Florists tend to be enthusiastic about the Valentine’s tulip trend, both for aesthetic and environmental reasons.
Unlike roses, tulips continue to change and grow after they’re cut. Ms. Culver said there was poetry in the way tulips moved with the sun from within their vase, taking the shape of whatever vessel contained them as they unfurled to show off their splendor.
“I personally will watch tulips until the last petal drops,” she said.
Like red roses, which symbolize love, tulips have their own symbolic meaning. In the language of flowers (used in Victorian England as a form of coded communication), tulips signified passion, according to the Smithsonian Gardens. The Society of American Florists further gives meaning to the flower based on its color. A pink tulip is for caring, while purple stands for royalty and red is a declaration of love. The flower’s expansive meanings help with its Valentine’s Day appeal. The holiday is no longer just for lovers, but a day to celebrate all kinds of love — friends, family and even pets.
“Roses are about sex,” said Andrew Miller, the owner of Tulip Valley Farms in Washington State, but tulips have “the meaning that we decide to give it.”
“I can give tulips to a buddy of mine that, you know, we go hunting together,” he said.
Allan Visser, a third-generation tulip farmer in the Netherlands, checked off the numerous upsides to the flower: They come in a variety of colors and shapes; they’re more sustainable because they can be grown more quickly, with less heat for shorter periods of time so even greenhouses use less energy than they would for roses.
Globally, there’s a growing demand for tulips, Mr. Visser said, noting that every year more tulip bulbs make their way to the United States from the Netherlands (where the bulk of the world’s tulips are grown) for holidays like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Easter.
A tulip is purely aesthetic, unlike flowers that can be used for their fruit or medicinally, said Ibo Gülsen, managing director of IGMPR, a boutique firm that designs and develops flower attractions around the world, and chairman of the World Tulip Society.
It’s a tradition that dates back thousands of years, he said, noting that while the Dutch are “now masters in tulip horticulture,” it was the Ottoman Empire that “set the standard” for tulip appreciation.
Mr. Gülsen said the tulip had long represented the start of a cycle, fertility and spring — themes that echo the ancient Roman origins of Valentine’s Day, and so it “makes sense to use a spring flower to celebrate that.”
Dorothy Smith, 34, said she spent a “significant amount of my disposable income” on a subscription for flower deliveries. When she signed up in 2020 for Molly Oliver Flowers’ service, Ms. Smith was engaged. She later married — and then divorced. It can make holidays like Valentine’s Day hard, she said, but she still has her fresh flowers.
“This week, especially, I was really excited to have these really, really special tulips in my apartment,” she said, adding that she was considering taking the flowers (in pottery she made) to the Valentine’s Day celebration for female friends only called Galentine’s Day.
“I wish I had more tulips to give,” she said, adding that “they feel sculptural almost” and “more special to me than a red rose.”
At Southside Blooms, a floral nonprofit in Chicago that regularly employs at-risk youths and favors “eco-friendly practices,” locally grown tulips have been on the Valentine’s Day menu for at least three years.
Natalie Ransom, a florist and the head of events at Southside Blooms, said the shop grew more tulips every year to meet the increasing demands of its customer base. Southside is growing 30,000 tulips this season, she said, and expects to use more than 1,000 on Valentine’s Day alone.
“It’s just a nice spring flower, especially during this time of year, where it’s chilly and kind of bleak,” she said.