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She and her husband, Daniel, named their business Port City Flowers, and they dreamed of one day buying a farm and growing fields of blooms.
So Katie and Daniel cleared the basement for growing. They bought two dehumidifiers and four fans to keep the room at about 70 degrees and 55 percent humidity; sank about $2,000 into refashioning a separate room into a “cooler” to store bulbs and cut flowers; and hung LED lights near extra bottles of champagne and spare tools. Near a map reading “Adventure awaits,” they installed two tables lined with hydroponic trays. On them, they planted roughly 2,000 bulbs.
Every morning and every evening, they walked downstairs and studied the trays. They checked to see which flowers were ready to harvest and which were showing signs of cell damage — their stems shaped like the beginning of a frown.
Five days before Valentine’s Day, the dark basement was bursting with color. The Pamplona tulips glowed red, the Dream Touch a deep purple, and the Mariage were just starting to open their petals, revealing layers of gentle blush pink. Katie felt like she and her husband had brought spring to Alexandria two months early.
She plucked 140 tulips, including the Mariage, and placed them in white and blue buckets. Then she hauled them to the cooler.
Two days before Valentine’s Day, Katie picked up the buckets, loaded them into her car and drove to a green storefront just outside Adams Morgan.
Amber Flack, the owner of Little Acre Flowers, grabbed the buckets and took them into her shop. Inside was a Valentine’s Day assembly line: Scissors gnawed at stems, razors sliced wrapping paper, and water slapped against dozens of empty vases.
It was Flack’s first Valentine’s Day as the owner of Little Acres, a flower shop that only sells locally grown blooms. The business runs in part on customers seeing value in locally planted flowers, which can last longer and are better for the planet. Roses, among the most popular cut flowers in the world, rarely grow in the D.C. during wintertime — unlike tulips.
Flack took the tulips from Burke and placed them in a fridge, sliding the door shut. Flowers were arriving from across the region: White forsythias, which smelled like nectar. Ornamental kale. Snapdragons. Then she went back to the fridge, grabbed the bucket of tulips that included the Mariage, and tucked them one by one into a white vase — balancing the shades of pink and peeling off leaves to find the right amount of green to complement the pink rather than overshadow it.
About 11:30 a.m., a man wandered in. He asked if he could buy a bouquet. The tulips outside had reminded him that Valentine’s Day was only two days away, and he had yet to plan anything for his wife. Flack told him that the store only took online orders. He rushed home to put one in.
Just before noon, Todd Geiwitz, who owns a local delivery company, picked up the bouquet with the Mariage tulip and loaded it into the back of his van. It was one of 60 deliveries on Monday, and about 400 through Valentine’s Day.
Geiwitz drove through tree-lined streets in upper Northwest Washington, past joggers and goldendoodles on long leashes. Then he arrived at his first job of the day. He opened the back door of his truck, and the smell of honey and citrus filled the damp February air.
He walked up the front steps to a bright blue door and rang the bell. Lauren Laitin answered. She saw the Mariage tulip glowing among the other flowers, its petals now mostly unfurled.
“Thank you so much,” she said. “This is so awesome.”
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