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.
It’s spooky season, which also means it’s boo basket season.
If you’re not familiar with the popular trend, a boo basket is when people give loved ones a gift basket filled with goodies and treats that are typically halloween themed. It is most commonly gifted from a boyfriend/husband to a girlfriend/wife.
The name “boo basket” is a double entendre that refers to the “boo” spooky element of halloween and “boo” as in the term sometimes used to refer to a boyfriend or girlfriend.
Boo baskets have also traditionally been given as anonymous presents to neighbors and many close-knit neighborhoods have traditions of “booing” each other with a basket.
These baskets make great gifts for friends, family and coworkers too. It’s a fun and seasonal way to brighten someone’s day and show you care.
To give you some inspiration for your boo basket this year, we put together our own version. Watch the video below for boo basket ideas:
The everyday selection brochure, which highlights many new products, is finally here!
The 41-page booklet features photographs of our current selection of flower bouquets, arrangements, plants, gifts and more. It’s designed to help flower lovers find the perfect arrangement for every occasion and mood.
There’s many different collections featured including the nautical-inspired “Nantucket” and “Cape May” collections, the thoughtful “Memories” rose collection, the loving and cheery “Tranquility” collection and more.
The Nantucket Deluxe featuring hydrangea, two roses, delphinium, Bells of Ireland, football mums, carnations, daisy poms, viking poms, and solidago graces the cover, evoking memories of beach days from this past Summer.
Our direct ship options, which ship anywhere in the Continental United States and include the arrangement, vase and flower food, are highlighted within the book as well as our direct ship succulent container.
Some of our snack and tea offerings are featured, including the Chocolate & Mug Gift Set and the limited edition “Jubilee” tea collection from Tea Forte featuring 20 tea infusers comprised of 10 different blends. Some of the flavors include Strawberry Hibiscus (Oolong tea), Cherry Blossom (Green tea) and Mango Citron (Herbal tea).
Our funeral offerings and sympathy gifts are also included. There is a double urn arrangement showcased along with a red rose open heart standing wreath for funeral and celebration of life services. The double urn arrangement is in all whites including hydrangea, roses, stock, alstroemeria, carnations, and daisy poms.
There are also flowers specifically curated to be given as gifts to grieving families.
Gift arrangements for all of life’s occasions are also highlighted. The “Baby Girl” bouquet made of mini green hydrangea, charmelia alstroemeria, a football mum, carnations, daisy poms, baby’s breath is shown. The arrangement comes with a pink stuffed unicorn to help welcome the new baby girl. A “Baby Boy” version featuring a blue and white stuffed cow and a blue and white arrangement is also available.
The “Beary Happy Birthday Vase” arrangement is shown, which includes a “Happy Birthday” stick-in and a tan bear with a party hat. A general celebration arrangement is also pictured, which includes a party horn and noise maker, and is perfect for all of the happy moments.
Plant mom and dads can peruse our new plant offerings, including our vibrant Triple Orchard Planter and tropical-style Bromeliad Planter.
We hope the new look book helps you find exactly what you are looking for. These books can be picked up at your local Connells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts and are complementary.
Grandparents Day is a time to celebrate our mom and dad’s parents and the significant impact many of them have had on us.
On Grandparents Day people often visit their loved ones, give them a phone call or send them a card. Others use the time to reminiscence about their late grandparents, possibly remembering the days cuddled in their laps listening to their stories.
According to Reader’s Digest, Marian McQuade of West Virginia created the holiday in 1956 after realizing a lot of senior citizens in her local nursing home were not visited by family while she was trying to plan a community celebration of the elderly.
McQuade then made it her mission to ensure they were not forgotten by creating Grandparents Day. It became an official holiday in 1978 when it was signed into law by former President Jimmy Carter.
However, the purpose of the holiday is not meant just for grandchildren to celebrate grandparents, but also the reverse. The National Grandparents Day Council says that the holiday is also meant for grandparents to celebrate their grandchildren.
The holiday is always celebrated on the Sunday after Labor Day in the United States. This year the special day is on September 8.
This year the official theme is “Grand Minds: Learn, Love, Legacy”. Generations United is encouraging people to #DoSomethingGrand this year with their grandparents and have a list of activity ideas on their website.
Grandparents Day Gift Ideas
We put together a Grandparents Day gift basket for those looking for ideas for Grandparents Day. Check out our basket below!
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.
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.
They inspired a speculative financial bubble in the 1600s and a hit song in the United States three centuries later.
Still today, tulips remain one of the most popular flowers in the world and a sure sign of spring when they rise from the ground in all of their beautiful bounty.
If you need a reprieve from the winter doldrums, one sure-fire way is to bring fresh-cut, colorful tulips into your home or workplace. What’s more, for their association with love, tulips are a popular choice as a Valentine’s Day gift.
Tulip mania
Royer’s Flowers & Gifts sources tulips from growers in the Netherlands, the world’s largest commercial producer of tulips. The capital city, Amsterdam, celebrates National Tulip Day on the third Saturday of January. The 2024 theme: Let’s Dance.
If you experienced the fervor for Beanie Babies in the 1990s, you got a taste for the speculative fever, or tulip mania, that overtook the Netherlands, peaking in the winter of 1636-37.
Tulips with a “striated effect,” or that went from a single color to a feathery or flamelike pattern, became inexplicably valuable: The price of the most-prized bulbs matched the going rate for a nice house. It was only discovered in the 19th century that this unique feature resulted from a virus.
“But in the 17th century, this was still not understood,” according to the BBC, “and so, strangely enough diseased tulips, emblazoned with distinctive patterns, became more prized than healthy ones in the Dutch Republic.”
Tulip trickery
Tulip mania came and went, but tulips took root in the Netherlands. It’s what DutchGrown.com, a wholesale flower bulb exporter, credits to the country’s “beautiful sandy soil, and a century old tradition of being able to control water and make it do whatever we want.”
Specifically, it requires a bit of “tulip trickery,” making “bulbs believe they have been through a hot, dry summer and an arctic winter” and replicating their native habitat.
Tulips technically are perennials, but they struggle to act that way in the warmer United States.
“Plant a bulb in fall and even a novice gardener can expect to see a beautiful flower come spring,” according to AmericanMeadows.com. “But getting a tulip to perform well in the second or third year is another story.”
Because tulips are one of the easiest flowers to grow in a garden, most American consumers replant bulbs every year.
Several other tidbits about tulips:
Even as a cut stem, tulips will continue to grow in water, lasting seven days after they have bloomed.
They do best in full sun and, like sunflowers, are heliotropic, bending toward light throughout the day.
They come in a variety of colors rich in symbolism: pink, happiness and confidence; purple, royalty; yellow, cheerful thoughts; white, forgiveness.
Red is the symbol of everlasting love, which strikes at the heart of the 1929 chart-topping song, “Tiptoe through the Tulips,” which appeared in a movie called “Gold Diggers of Broadway.” (Cult artist Tiny Tim would turn it into a hit again in the 1960s.)
“And when I kiss you in the garden in the moonlight,” the song says, “Will you pardon me and tiptoe through the tulips with me?”
Connells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts will give away red, white and blue bouquets to military veterans on Nov. 11, Veterans Day.
The 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. You’ll find store hours here.
“This is one of our favorite events each year,” said Tom Royer, president and CEO of family-owned Connells Maple Lee. “It is our honor and privilege to recognize the men and women who give so much to protect our freedom.”
Non-veterans may purchase the bouquets for $2.20 each.
A truck set out in early August on a journey into the future of foliage plants.
It’s destination was a 200-acre farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Virginia, in the town of Stuarts Draft. On that farm lies a five-acre building that from above looks like nothing so much as a gigantic Lego piece (photo, below).
It’s a state-of-the art greenhouse where The Plant Co., which was birthed during the pandemic, is drawing on one family’s decades of floriculture experience and the latest technology in a quest to “reinvent the houseplant industry.”
Connells Maple Lee, along with its sister company in Pennsylvania, are the first florists to carry The Plant Co.’s products.
“It was amazing to see how many of our own people purchased the Proven Winners plants as soon as they came in,” said Cheryl Brill, Connells Maple Lee’s chief operating officer.
Connells Maple Lee first got to know The Plant Co. this spring when they attended the International Floriculture Expo in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Within weeks, the two companies were trading visits, including one to the massive greenhouse in Virginia, which opened in 2020.
Tissue culture
“This is all great stuff,” recalled Connells Maple Lee CEO Tom Royer, upon seeing the plants.
Royer noted that in the past 30 years, mass marketers began offering foliage plants. Florida growers either catered to those customers, turning plants into mere commodities, or went out of business altogether.
The result was plants that weren’t as special as they once were. That left fertile ground for The Plant Co., the brainchild of founders and brothers-in-law Jason Van Wingerden and Frank Paul.
Just as four generations of Royers have made the family name synonymous with flower shops, the Van Wingerden family is deeply rooted in the greenhouse trade. It began with Aart and Cora Van Wingerden, who arrived from Holland in 1948 and started a greenhouse business in New Jersey, spawning many other similar enterprises.
Jason Van Wingerden, a grandson of Aart and Cora, worked at Green Circle Growers in Oberlin, Ohio, which Jason’s father started in 1968. Green Circle comprises 150 acres of indoor growing space, making it one of the largest greenhouses in the United States. Frank Paul was Green Circle’s former head grower of orchids.
The brothers-in-law settled on western Virginia for its climate, proximity to interstates 81 and 64, and high-quality well water, said Ben Wright, The Plant Co.’s national account manager.
The elevation in the Blue Ridge Mountains means warm days, cool nights and “good, consistent quality growth year-round,” Wright said.
The Plant Co.’s products begin as tissue culture in test tubes, arriving from labs around the world, before they are rooted in soil in the greenhouse. Tissue culture makes the plants cleaner and less prone to disease.
Ease of care and use
The greenhouse’s 21-foot ceilings keep plants cooler, as do metal poles that are powder coated white to absorb less heat.
Thirteen layers of sand and gravel sit below capillary mats. Plants are watered from below through the mats, then the water drains back into holding tanks so it isn’t wasted.
Carbon dioxide from the greenhouse’s high-efficiency natural gas boilers is captured and pumped into the greenhouse to encourage plant growth.
The plants are promoted for their quality but also for their ease of care and use. The plants are sold with tags that include the variety name, genus and species and information about where to use them within a room and how to care for them.
The goal is to embolden consumers who haven’t had success with plants in the past.
“And so they kind of discover that green thumb,” Wright said.
The Royer’s Flowers & Gifts Kids Club is looking for its next birthday card design.
Children ages 5 to 12 are eligible to participate in the kids club’s annual design contest. The winner will receive a free bouquet delivery on his or her birthday.
The card is emailed to kids club members on their birthdays.
Entries must be dropped off by July 15 at one of Connells Maple Lee’s three stores: 3014 E. Broad St., Bexley; 2033 Stringtown Road, Grove City; and 8573 Owenfield Drive, Powell.
To download an entry form (and to join the kids club at no cost), visit cmlflowers.com/kidsclub.
