What's in Season: A Bakersfield Flower Calendar

Flowers are a crop. That sounds obvious written down, but it is easy to forget when you are looking at a website where everything appears to be available every day of the year.

Seasonality is the single biggest lever you have on what you get for your money. A stem at the peak of its season is cheaper, opens better and lasts longer than the same stem flown in out of season. Buy with the calendar and a hundred dollars looks like a hundred and fifty. Fight it and the reverse is true.

This is the calendar we actually work to at market, written for Bakersfield rather than for a catalogue.

Winter: December, January, February

• December. Evergreens, noble fir, cedar and pine at their best, along with amaryllis, paperwhites and hellebore. Red and white roses are strong but priced for the holidays. This is the one month where greenery does as much work as flowers.
• January. The quiet month, and the best value of the year. Tulips arrive, ranunculus starts, and anemone is at its peak with that black centre nothing else has. If you want a lot of flower for the money, January is when.
• February. Ranunculus and anemone hit their best week. Roses go up in price for obvious reasons - if you want value in February, ask for anything other than a red rose and we can do something genuinely more interesting for the same money.

Spring: March, April, May

• March. The turn. Tulips, daffodils, hyacinth, early lilac and flowering branch - quince and cherry. Branch work is underrated and makes an arrangement look twice its size.
• April. Peak spring. Lilac, sweet pea, garden roses starting, snapdragon, stock, delphinium. If someone has an April birthday, they are lucky and they should know it.
• May. Peonies, for about three weeks, and they are worth planning around. Garden roses come fully into their own. Mother's Day pushes prices up in the first half of the month, so the back half of May is quietly one of the best times of the year to buy flowers.

Summer: June, July, August

• June. The last of the peonies, then a wall of garden roses, hydrangea, lisianthus and scabiosa. Wedding season, so the good stuff moves fast and ordering ahead matters.
• July. Sunflowers, dahlias beginning, zinnia, celosia, gladiolus. This is the loud, saturated end of the year and it suits a summer table.
• August. Dahlias at their absolute best - and if you have never had a bouquet built around dahlias in August, that is the recommendation on this page. Also sunflower, amaranth and grasses.

Fall: September, October, November

• September. Dahlias still going, plus the first of the copper and rust tones. Chrysanthemum starts, and the good garden varieties are nothing like the supermarket ones.
• October. Deep colour. Burgundy, plum, rust, bronze. Chrysanthemum, marigold, ornamental kale, hypericum berry and the first branches with leaves worth using.
• November. Thanksgiving territory. Everything warm - orange roses, copper mums, seeded eucalyptus, wheat, dried elements. Order Thanksgiving centrepieces by the Monday of that week.

The Bakersfield heat rule

This is the local part, and it overrides the calendar above.

From roughly June through September, our afternoons are hot enough that some flowers simply will not perform outdoors or in a hot car, no matter how good they were at market. Hydrangea wilts. Delicate garden roses blow open in a day. Anything with a soft, thin petal struggles.

What does hold up in real heat: sunflowers, zinnia, celosia, protea and other tropicals, succulents, carnations - which have a bad reputation they no longer deserve - and most greenery. If your arrangement is going outdoors in July, or sitting in a car for any length of time, tell us and we will build to that rather than to the picture.

How to actually use this

You do not need to memorise any of it. You just need one sentence when you order: "Build me something in these colours, for about this much, using whatever is best this week."

That is what Designer's Choice is, and it is consistently the best value on our menu, because it lets us put the money into whatever was genuinely excellent at market that morning rather than into filling a fixed recipe.

If you want to plan around the calendar, three things are worth diarising: peonies in May, dahlias in August, and the quiet stretch in late January when everything is cheap and beautiful at the same time.

See what we have this week, or call (661) 588-7997 and ask what came in this morning. We like that question.