Love in bloom

Thanks for the flowers, but what do they mean? Anna Pavord looks beyond the rose, and offers a brief guide to Valentine's Day bouquets

Fifty million stems of red roses will be saying "I love you" on Valentine's Day next week. If only the poet had said, "My love is like a yellow, yellow tulip", life would be much easier for the flower growers and sellers who have to fly roses thousands of miles from the more equable climates of South America and Kenya to satisfy demand at this unseasonable time of the year.

I've gone off red roses in a big way since a trip to Ecuador this time last year. Vast tracts of the country were covered in polythene tunnels filled with bushes of red roses, and further vast tracts of native wild flowers were being bulldozed to prepare for yet more of this rapacious monoculture. Production was just coming to a peak for Valentine's Day.

The compounds were guarded by blockhouses and sub-machine-guns. From the barbed-wire of the perimeter fence you could see girls picking the flowers, the air in the tunnels (and outside) thick with the acrid smell of sulphur. It's burnt to destroy pests and disease. It does a good job on lungs, too.

So I hope nobody sends me red roses next week, even though the ones from Ecuador are reckoned to be the best in the business. "Fat as cabbages," said a wholesaler approvingly. They are different beasts entirely from the plastic-wrapped sheaves of roses sold in quick deals to motorists with guilty consciences, held up at traffic lights on the way home from work. These roses are cheap, but having been kept in suspended animation for weeks in storehouses at low temperatures, the poor things have forgotten how to live. The buds droop. The flowers rarely open up. Worst of all, they have no smell.

But roses, even at pounds 5 or pounds 6 a stem, still dominate the Valentine's Day market. Florists describe the suddenly inflated price of these flowers as "a market reaction to a supply and demand situation".

Interflora, which handled about half a million Valentine's Day orders last year, says that 90 per cent of the bouquets it sends will contain roses. Seven million of them are sold in the UK on Valentine's Day.

The trade is mostly one-way, though the company has noticed an increasing trend for women to send flowers to men. Even so, it still accounts for only 10 per cent of the business.

Lovers, though, do not equal mothers when it comes to receiving flowers. Mothers' Day (which this year falls on 9 March) is still the best bonanza day for florists, though the Valentine's Day trade has been steadily catching up over the past 10 years, and is now reckoned to be at least pounds 22m a year.

What, besides roses, are the other most popular flowers to send on Valentine's Day? Carnations, chrysanthemums, daffodils, lilies and tulips appear in the top 10 of most people's favourites. Does the kind of flower you send say anything about you as a lover? I think it does.

Roses: from a lover who feels safest as one of the herd and for whom imagination will never be a strong point. Life with this person will be safe but predictable. Acceptable but unexceptional.

Extra marks, though, for a Valentine who buys yellow roses rather than red. Yellow is the colour of the Monet moment, and choosing it shows at least the kernel of a desire to break away from the pack. Roses, though, are best kept for a summer surprise, when a bunch fresh-picked from the garden, and drenched in swoony scent, does have the authentic touch of romance. Even when the flowers are crawling with greenfly.

Carnations: acceptable only if they overpower you with their smell. If they don't, then your lover, too, must be under suspicion of being unable to deliver what the outside appearance promises. Much also depends on the colour and style of the carnations. Some are of a pink vicious enough to sear the irises out of your eyeballs. No future in that relationship.

The picotees, dark colours edged in light, or vice versa, indicate greater subtlety, which may be a good sign for those in long-term relationships. Few flowers match the carnation's grim determination to hang on in there, long after lesser flowers have thrown in the trowel.

Chrysanthemums: definitely a no-no on Valentine's Day. "Mums" - as they are affectionately known in the trade - smell of harvest festivals and funerals, neither of them appropriate at this particular juncture. Anyone who hands over chrysanthemums on 14 February must be suspected of a huge gap in his understanding of what is an appropriate response to life's little circumstances.

This is a lover who later on - for your birthday, perhaps - will give you new insoles for your wellington boots, when you dream of Jimmy Choo's strappy, show-stopping, designer-chic sandals. This is a lover who will say, more times than you want to hear, "I do like a nice pizza takeaway on a Thursday". Steer clear.

Daffodils: I'd trust a man who gave me daffodils. Hackneyed, say some, but I don't think so. Daffodils fit the bill seasonally, and, in love as in life in general, you like to feel you are getting the right things at the right time.

Look for the bright, two-tone 'Soleil d'Or' jonquils grown in the Scilly Isles, rather than the blunt-faced, knock-you-down-at-20-yards, yellow trumpet types. The smell will lead you to jonquils in a flower shop, even if you go in blindfolded. There's hope in daffodils. That's a dangerously fragile commodity at the best of times, but now is the season to indulge it.

Lilies: fine if you feel you can live up to the theatrical aura they throw around them. Lilies will come from people who care very much about their appearance - perhaps more about theirs than yours, which is scarcely in the spirit of Valentine's Day giving.

Let the stamens be the deciding factor. If your Valentine insists on cutting them off, on the grounds that the pollen will stain the Armani suit, then get free of the relationship as soon as you can. Just think how such a suitor would hog the bathroom. Impossible. In a crisis, remember that white lilies such as Casablanca are better than pink. Stargazer lilies are worse than nothing.

Tulips: as far as I'm concerned, these are the best, indeed the only flowers to send or receive on Valentine's Day. Wild, irrepressible, wayward, unpredictable, strange, subtle, generous, elegant - tulips are everything you would wish for in a lover. Best of all are the crazy parrot tulips such as Rococo with red and pink petals feathered and flamed in crinkly lime green.

"When a young man presents a tulip to his mistress," wrote Sir John Chardin in Travels in Persia (1686), "he gives her to understand by the general red colour of the flower, that he is on fire with her beauty, and by the black base, that his heart is burned to coal." That's the way to do it.

Flowers courtesy of Wild at Heart, Turquoise Island, 222 Westbourne Grove, London W11 (0171-727 3095).