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Author: Neal

Christmas is a cold-weather holiday, but poinsettias like it warm

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Poinsettias
Poinsettias are America’s No. 1 potted plant, with red being the most popular color.

Christmas is celebrated around the world, but it clearly leans into cold weather.

Santa lives at the North Pole, after all. Among the most common holiday imagery are snow-covered evergreens, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose.

But it doesn’t take a lot of sleuthing on the Internet to find a stock image of Santa unwinding after a globe-trotting Christmas Eve. He’s lounging in a beach chair, his red pant legs rolled up, his bare feet in sand. Often, there’s a colorful drink in his hand, a turquoise-blue body of water nearby.

It is the season of believing, after all. But if a sun-soaking Santa seems far-fetched to you, here’s a warm weather connection to Christmas that you don’t have to take on faith.

It’s a fact that the poinsettia – the official plant of Christmas – is native to Mexico. It’s a tropical plant that finds its comfort zone between 65 to 70 degrees during the day.

Despite having only a six-week selling season, poinsettias are America’s No. 1 potted plant, racking up sales of $250 million each year, according to the Future Farmers of America organization.

The plant takes its name from Joel Roberts Poinsett, a native of South Carolina who is credited with bringing the poinsettia to the United States while he was serving as the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico.

Red poinsettias remain the most popular, but they come in more than 100 varieties, “including shades of white, cream, pink, purple, orange and yellow,” FFA noted. Poinsettias are grown in all 50 states.

The colorful part of the plant is a modified leaf called a bract, which often is mistaken as the flower. You must look in the center of the bracts for the small yellow flowers, known as cyathium.

No matter the size or the color of your poinsettia, you’ll want to take these steps to make it last long.

  • Average room temperature is fine. Poinsettias can’t tolerate cold (including icy water) and can suffer from droopy leaves (a condition known as epinasty) if exposed to cold temperatures.
  • Epinasty also can result from a build-up of ethylene gas. Big-box retailers are notorious for leaving poinsettias in plastic sleeves, which trap ethylene and essentially ruin the plant.
  • Bright, ample light is best for the plant, mimicking conditions in Mexico.
  • Keep the plant moist but not sitting in water. Like people, poinsettias don’t like wet feet. The frequency and amount of water will vary depending upon the amount of sunlight, humidity and pot size to which the plant is exposed.
  • Poinsettias are sensitive plants, so you want to avoid banging them into things as they can bruise easily.

Not only are poinsettias a prominent part of Christmas, but they are the subject of their own holiday.

National Poinsettia Day, celebrated on Dec. 12, marks the anniversary of the day that Joel Roberts Poinsett died in 1851.

Connells Maple Lee celebrating veterans with free red, white and blue bouquets on Nov. 11

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Connells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts will salute military veterans on Nov. 11 with free red, white and blue bouquets.

The Veterans Day bouquets – featuring a red carnation, a white carnation and a blue bow – will be available in-store only at 3014 E. Broad St., Bexley; 2033 Stringtown Road, Grove City; and 8573 Owenfield Drive, Powell. Click here for store hours.

“Honoring the men and women who protect our freedom has become a favorite tradition in our stores,” said Tom Royer, president and CEO of family-owned Connells Maple Lee. “We are forever thankful for the dedication and sacrifice that our veterans and their families have made for all of us in our great country.”

Non-veterans may purchase the bouquets for $2.20 each.

Catalogs usher in new season for our brand

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Connells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts Fall 2024 Catalog
Connells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts Year-Round Catalog, Fall 2024

When you’re a fourth-generation family-owned business nearing its 90th year in operation, you cherish your company history.

But a hallmark of Connells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts’ enduring legacy is honoring its past while still being willing and able to change course when circumstances dictate.

That agility has made Connells Maple Lee one of the most successful florists in the United States.

Sometimes change is thrust upon you suddenly, as it was during the coronavirus pandemic, an existential threat that forced Connells Maple Lee to rethink many of the ways it functioned. At other times, Connells Maple Lee has had to respond to structural developments in society, which brings us to our latest rebranding effort.

The first glimpse of that new look and feel began arriving in customers’ mailboxes this fall in the form of our year-round and fall catalogs.

Increasingly digital world

Go Welsh, our long-time design agency, is leading the rebranding.

“Whatever we do and propose,” said agency owner Craig Welsh, “it has to live in digital, but it can’t feel digital.”

At its heart, the rebranding addresses the challenge of promoting the organic feeling of flowers in an increasingly digital world.

More than half of our sales now occur online. All those swipes, clicks and taps come at a faster pace than the turning of a printed page, making it harder to capture the public’s attention.

The new catalogs feature a reworking of our logo, distilled from the long-stemmed flower it has been for decades into a clean, contained round icon that’s more recognizable across media.

On social media, Craig noted, an “icon becomes much more prominent in the expectation” among users. And with increased awareness, that icon can become the brand’s primary mark, lending itself to many more uses.

Mid-century modern

The icon makes for a “much cleaner brand presence visually,” Craig said, but the flip side is that the mathematical representation of shapes, lines and curves in the digital realm can overpower the organic world.

That’s why Go Welsh seized on the idea of bringing organic into the mix through inks made from flower petals and stems. Jenna Flickinger, a Go Welsh designer, keeps vials of ink at her desk, with labels such as lily, lavender and pansy, and clematis.

She boils the petals herself, adding salt (to release color) and gum arabic (a stabilizer) to create ink. She brushes the ink onto watercolor paper and then scans the washes into her computer.

Some of the colors and textures have been incorporated into the new catalogs, but the learning process continues. From vial to dried paper, the ink colors aren’t always predictable.

“Even though this was a pink carnation,” Jenna said of one example, “it still [dried as] this yellow color.”

Craig described the rebranding as a “mid-century modern aesthetic,” invoking a design style known for sleek lines connected to nature and a timeless essence.

“We’re trying to find a place where we can combine this organic sensibility with the vector, screen-based digital stuff, so we started looking at mid-century modern sensibilities,” Craig said.

It starts with the new catalogs, but you can expect to see many more representations in the year ahead.

Grove City resident is runner-up in our annual name-the-arrangement contest

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Participants in Connells Maple Lee's name-the-arrangement contest in 2024 are asked to give a name to this holiday design. It features carnations, poms and a rose with noble fir and boxwood, ribbon and berries, all in a silver and red tin.

To silver and gold, jingle and jangle, add another classic holiday pairing: “Berries & Boughs”

The last one is courtesy of Joanne Beasy of Grove City, the runner-up in our annual name-the-arrangement contest.

The contest winner was Jennifer Davis of Lebanon, Pa., with the name “Merriment.” Davis entered the contest through Connells Maple Lee’s sister company Royer’s Flowers & Gifts, which has 15 stores in Pennsylvania.

Beasy and Davis each will receive the new holiday arrangement as their prize.

The arrangement features carnations, poms and a rose with noble fir and boxwood, ribbon and berries, all in a silver and red tin. It will be available for purchase after Thanksgiving.

Congratulations to Beasy and Davis and thank you to everyone who participated. We look forward to doing this again next year!

You could name Connells Maple Lee’s new holiday arrangement

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Participants in Connells Maple Lee's name-the-arrangement contest in 2024 are asked to give a name to this holiday design. It features carnations, poms and a rose with noble fir and boxwood, ribbon and berries, all in a silver and red tin.

Christmas in July is giving way to the holiday arrangement of August.

This year’s Conells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts name-the-arrangement contest focuses on a new holiday design.

The arrangement features carnations, poms and a rose with noble fir and boxwood, ribbon and berries, all in a silver and red tin. What it lacks is a name.

To view the arrangement and enter the contest, visit cmlflowers.com/contest. Limit one entry daily per email address, through Aug. 18.

One winner and one runner-up will be selected from entries submitted to Connells Maple Lee and its sister company in Pennsylvania. Both the winner and runner-up will receive the arrangement (retail value $39.99) as their prize.

Lewis Center’s Shea Berridge wins Connells Maple Lee birthday card design contest

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Shea’s design will adorn the birthday card that all members receive in the coming year. The third-grader “just loves to be creative and outgoing,” her mother said.

In the year ahead, members of the Connells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts Kids Club will celebrate a “hoppy” birthday courtesy of Shea Berridge.

Shea, who is turning 9 and entering third grade, is the winner of this year’s kids club birthday card design contest.

Her design features a bunny wearing a flower tiera and will adorn the electronic card that kids club members receive in the coming year. Her prize is a free flower delivery.

She is the daughter of Shawn and Christi Berridge, who live in Lewis Center with Shea and her older brother.

“She just loves to be creative and outgoing,” Christi said about Shea, who is active in dance, cheer and the Girl Scouts.

The kids club is free for children ages 5 to 12. Parents may register their children at any Connells Maple Lee store or at cmlflowers.com/kidsclub. Kids club benefits also include a membership card, online activities and a quarterly e-mail newsletter.

Ask the florist: common questions we get from customers

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This shows a florist reviewing notes while standing at a table adorned with roses, tulips and ribbon.
If you have a question about flowers, don’t hesitate to contact your local store.

Besides providing the freshest, most beautiful product we can, Connells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts prides itself on delivering top-notch customer service before and after a sale.

We’re always happy to discuss a specific situation, but here are answers to some of the most common questions we receive from customers.

Q: I’ve heard of homemade flower foods, including mixing Sprite with aspirin or placing a penny in the bottom of a vase. Do these options work as well as your flower packets do in prolonging flower freshness?

A: No, our flower food is formulated with ingredients to help lower the pH levels, antimicrobials to help prevent stem rot, and sugar to provide energy for buds to open. Home remedies won’t achieve those ends.  

Q: Is this item appropriate for this occasion?

A: We answer this question with questions of our own. For instance, will a recipient be home enough or attentive enough to care for a plant, or would fresh flowers be a better option requiring less of a commitment?

Funerals prompt many special requests, such as adding pictures or personal items to a funeral arrangement. We help families decide the best way to honor their loved one.

Q: What is wrong with my plant?

A:  Most of the time there is an issue with either too much or not enough water. Other times the cause is with bugs or disease. We usually can figure it out with the help of a picture.

Q: Do you carry blue or black roses?

A:  Unfortunately, neither grows naturally. Right now, we offer a blue rose that has been died and dried. We don’t recommend using floral spray to achieve those colors because the spray can shorten the vase life of the rose. We typically suggest complementing the rose with babies breath that has been sprayed blue or black or adding an accent ribbon in the desired color.

Q: What do the flowers (especially roses) mean?

A: A red rose symbolizes love; a yellow rose is for happiness/friendship; a pink rose is for admiration; a white rose represents peace, sympathy and hope. (You’ll find more on flower meanings here.)

Of course, if you have a concern not addressed here, please don’t hesitate to contact your local store. We’re always  here to help you. 

You’re going to fall in love with this year’s rose sale

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This is a photo of red roses.

Roses are most associated with Valentine’s Day in February, but June is National Rose Month.

In June, roses are in bloom, popular at weddings and a symbol of beauty and passion as spring gives way to summer.

They’re also a great value as evidenced by Connells Maple Lee’s annual rose sale, which runs May 22 through June 15 in our stores and online.

Natural growing cycle

Roses are available year-round, but they’re a particularly good value in June thanks to their natural growing cycle.

A rose farm typically harvests its crop every six to eight weeks, or about the amount of time between Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day in May. But while there’s another big crop of roses in late spring, there is not a corresponding holiday to absorb all of them.

The sale

That leaves a thorny situation in which supply outstrips demand, making roses more affordable for florists and, by extension, our customers.

Our sale comprises:

  • One-dozen rose bunch for $9.42 (in-store only)
  • A Rosie arrangement featuring one-dozen or two-dozen colored roses for $46.99 or $56.99, respectively
  • A Rose Delight arrangement with four-dozen colored roses for $99.99, or $15 off the regular price.
  • Three-dozen arranged long-stemmed red roses for $149.00, or $20 off.

Whether you’re giving them as a gift to someone else or showing yourself a little love, roses are ready and at an even better value through June 15.

Flowers have always been at the center of Memorial Day

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What we call Memorial Day originally was known as Decoration Day, and it may have begun in Boalsburg, Pa., near Penn State University.

Boalsburg calls itself the birthplace of Memorial Day, claiming that the custom of decorating soldiers’ graves began there in October 1864.

While the New York Times noted that several places make similar claims, what’s not in dispute is the central role that flowers have played throughout the history of Memorial Day.

In Boalsburg, three women – Emma Hunter, Sophie Keller and Elizabeth Myers – were said to have placed flowers and wreaths on the graves of men who died while serving the Union during the Civil War.

“The holiday grew out of the Civil War,” the Times wrote in 2023, “as Americans – Northern, Southern, Black and white – struggled to honor the staggering number of dead soldiers, at least 2 percent of the U.S. population at the time.”

The war ended in spring 1865. Soon after, in Charleston, S.C., at a service to commemorate the lives of Union captives buried in a mass grave, 3,000 schoolchildren led the way carrying roses. In 1866 in Columbus, Miss., women placed flowers on the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers.

The first national commemoration was in 1868, when Gen. John Logan, the commander in chief of an organization of Union veterans, called for May 30 to be “designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country.”

National Poppy Day

Red poppies became associated with Memorial Day by way of World War I, specifically the poem “In Flanders Fields,” written by Canadian physician, writer and soldier John McCrae. He noticed poppies growing among the graves of soldiers buried in Belgium.

“In Flanders Fields the poppies blow,” he wrote, “Between the crosses row on row.”

The American Legion adopted the poppy as its official flower in 1920 and began distributing fabric poppies nationally in 1924. At the American Legion’s urging, Congress designated the Friday before Memorial Day as National Poppy Day.

After World War II, the holiday became better known as Memorial Day and officially in 1967. Memorial Day was observed on May 30 until 1971, when it was enshrined as the last Monday of May to ensure a three-day weekend.

While officially meant to honor the service and sacrifice of America’s fallen soldiers, Memorial Day has assumed broader meaning for some, who use the occasion to pay tribute to family and friends who have died.

One constant remains: flowers.

Flowers of Remembrance Day

Perhaps no greater example exists than Arlington National Cemetery, where the nonprofit Memorial Day Flowers Foundation has placed flowers on graves since 2011. That first year, the organization had enough money to buy flowers for 10,000 of some 300,000 headstones.

In 2023, the foundation announced that it could afford flowers for only half of the graves. But last-minute donations and help from the floral industry, according to Stars and Stripes, likely ensuring a flower for each grave.

“We are so grateful to the American public and the generosity of our floral importers, who are literally donating thousands of flowers by the pallet, to ensure our fallen military heroes are honored this year,” said Ramiro Penaherrera, executive director of the foundation.

Thousands of volunteers place the flowers on the Arlington graves on Flowers of Remembrance Day, the Sunday before Memorial Day.

We celebrate ‘Mom’ every day at Connells Maple Lee

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Hannah “Mom” Royer and husband, Lester, the founders of Connells Maple Lee’s sister company in Pennsylvania.

Her friends called her “Hanny” or “Beckie” back in 1922 when Hannah Sherman of Myerstown, Lebanon County, was a senior at Elizabethtown College near Lancaster, Pa.

Born in 1901, Hannah was a member of the college’s Homerian Literary Society, participated in chorus and glee club, played tennis and baseball.

“What can be more pleasing than a young lady who is virtuous and adorned with womanly graces?” read the text beneath her senior photo in the Etonian yearbook. “She is always pleasant and scatters sunshine wherever she goes.”

Hannah was pursuing a two-year “pedagogical course” to become a teacher at a time when mandatory school attendance laws were driving demand for educators and providing a new career opportunity for women.

‘She will bring joy’

“We predict for her a successful future, for we know that her whole heart will be in her work, whatever it may be,” the yearbook concluded, “and she will bring joy into the lives of the friends she meets.”

Hannah would become a first-grade teacher, marry classmate Lester Royer of Black Rock, Md., and raise a family. She would assume a new nickname, “Mom,” and prove the Etonian remarkably prescient.

But teaching wasn’t her true calling. Hannah, whose remarkable life would see her to age 96, would put her whole heart into the floral business. Her enduring legacy is Connells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts and sister company Royer’s Flowers & Gifts in Pennsylvania, which together constitute one of the most successful flower shops in American history.

Hannah and Lester, a high school biology teacher, married in 1925 and had their first child in 1929, the year of the stock market crash and the start of the Great Depression. By 1937, they had three children and were living on Lester’s salary alone.

Both Hannah and Lester, known as “Pop,” had grown up on farms. At their Lebanon home, they grew enough produce to help feed their family and sell some to neighbors for additional income.

Their son Ken, in his book “Retailing Flowers Profitably,” said Hannah “expanded our crop selection to include African violets, which she grew on her windowsills.

“The violets were sold at first by our next-door neighbor, who worked in a garment factory in Lebanon … . The addition of violets made our business a year-round enterprise rather than a summer-only produce business.”

Patient and persistent

Ken, who would follow his parents into the family floral business, noted that his mother started selling flowers at local farmers markets, refusing to let the initially tepid response wilt her will. Hannah, whom Ken described as patient and persistent, kept going back until business picked up.

“I have often reflected on this sequence and decided that my mother’s decision to go back after that first dismal experience was probably the most important event in the development of the business we now enjoy,” Ken wrote.

By 1945, having fielded requests for cut flowers, Mom Royer concluded that she needed training in floral arranging. Off she went to a two-week course in Gloucester, Mass.

Upon her return, the family converted the two-car garage behind its house into the South Side Flower Shop. The store operated from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday, but after-hours customers could summon Hannah with a bell that rang in the family home.

Lester ultimately would join the business full-time, operating the greenhouses while Hannah ran the retail store.

Lester was a lay minister in their church, which Ken said was “always his first love. Business was not a source of inspiration or an emotional stimulation to him. Mom was the driving force behind the business.”

Hannah and Lester sold the business, renamed Royer’s Flowers, to their sons Ken and Glenn in the 1950s. With three stores in the Columbus area and 16 stores in south-central and eastern Pennsylvania, the business remains under family ownership.

Ken’s sons Greg, who is chairman, and Tom, president and CEO, represent the third generation. They were later joined by Greg’s sons Andrew and Geoff, who serve as vice presidents. More of the fourth generation is waiting in the wings as cousins Tommy Royer and Evan Royer are pursuing business degrees in college with plans of joining the family business.

To put that into perspective, according to the Conway Center for Family Business in Columbus, only 3 percent of family businesses operate at the fourth-generation level and beyond.

Mother’s Day comes but once a year, but every day that Connells Maple Lee and Royer’s operate is a celebration of the legacy of Hannah “Mom” Royer.