Flower-Picking No Easy Feat in Forest Hills

Alright guys, time to use your heads. Valentine’s Day is on Tuesday, and that means that by Tuesday, if you’re going to do something special — it should already be set up.

So take the advice of Tony Sparacino at on Metropolitan Avenue: get your floral orders in now.

“It’s a men’s holiday, really,” Sparacino said. “Women don’t buy themselves flowers. It’s all men. And men do everything last minute.”

That’s why, he added, he’ll be wall-to-wall customers starting Sunday and ending at the close of business on Tuesday. And it’s also why you’re likely to pay more now for flowers than you will any other time of year.

“I don’t raise prices just to raise prices. It’s because [wholesale] prices are high, prices on every flower have gone up. By law, I have to post the prices of my flowers,” he said, pointing at a row of erasable-ink price labels taped to his display case. “I hadn’t changed those prices since May — until yesterday.”

Knowing that flowers are going to cost a pretty penny doesn’t help the average fella, however. You’ve got to know what’s popular now, and what’s likely to set that young woman’s heart aflutter.

“Red roses are obviously the most popular, but around here in Forest Hills, we order and sell as many colored roses as red ones,” Sparacino said. “It just depends where you are. We had a shop in Brooklyn, all we ever ordered were red roses. In Forest Hills we have such a cosmopolitan customer base, the colored roses — white, pink — sell as well as the red ones.”

It’s not as easy as just pointing at the roses, either, he admitted. While most flower shops can just order based on what was popular last year, at Father & Son Florists, information from a shipping diary of previous years just goes right out the window.

“I’ve been here 18 years, and buying the same as the year before doesn’t work in this neighborhood. We do a lot of mixed flowers, special orders. Nothing is the norm in Forest Hills.”

Once Valetine’s Day is past, however, things go back to normal very quickly at the shop on Metropolitan Avenue.

“The day after Valentine’s, if I have 500 roses left over, I just can them,” he said. “I’m not going to sell those, anyway.”