With Mother”s Day approaching, business is booming inside The University Florist at Mississippi State University.
Student workers bustle about, taking orders and putting together floral arrangements. Others come to the shop to pick up flowers, vases and other keepsakes for the coming holiday.
Right in the middle of it is manager Lynette McDougald, a Eupora native who oversees operations at The University Florist, but also teaches floral management classes at Mississippi State.
For McDougald, floristry is more than a job, it”s carrying on a family tradition she thinks might be in her blood.
“My mother and grandmother did flowers out of necessity,” she said. “In rural Mississippi, if you wanted flowers and you appreciated that sort of thing, they had it and they did it.
“And I wonder sometimes, knowing my daughter (Beth) works here (at The University Florist) too, if there”s a natural tendency toward this or if something is built in,” McDougald continued. “There”s an ability (in the family), and I”m glad. I enjoy it. ”
So how did you end up in Starkville?
We moved here about 16 years ago. My husband (Ron) is the chaplain out at Trinity Place in Columbus, so we moved here with his job, and I soon went to work out here at the flower shop. I grew up in a nursery, so that was sort of my background, and I had majored in horticulture.
That was my next question. How did you get into the floristry business?
My uncle had a nursery in Eupora and that”s what I did. I worked it all through high school. Then I majored in horticulture and moved around with my husband and ended up back in Starkville. I was real lucky that this all sort of fell into place.
What is it about this business that appeals to you?
Every day is a different day. You think you”ve seen it all because you”re dealing with a lot of variables. You know you”re looking at the commodity itself being perishable. You never know what”s going to happen with that. You have to stay on top of it. We buy from so many different markets. We buy from around the world. So, right now, if there”s some sort of problem in Colombia, Mother”s Day stuff is going to be, well, they”re going to have problems. The weather is not conducive to growing right now, so it will cut back availability. Everybody is scrambling to find products from other places. The freeze in Florida messed up the foliage for Mother”s Day. When the volcano in Iceland exploded, we couldn”t get our Dutch shipments. So, from that standpoint, every day is different, and it”s always real interesting to play the market. But, at the same time, that commodity has its own life. And we sell emotions. We”re involved in everybody”s happy times, sad times and that sort of thing. Everybody”s story is different. Their need is different. The emotion connected to it, it”s their personal lives. It keeps it real fresh. It keeps it real new.
Is this your busiest time of the year?
Yes, the spring is, when you start with Valentine”s Day and you roll into the spring holidays. All of the cut-flower people say Mother”s Day is the biggest cut-flower holiday, and it is in the sense that there”s such a variety of flowers available. You know, Valentine”s is a bunch of roses. More or less, that”s what you do. But as the season continues on, with the types of flowers, there”s a lot more out there on the market. So, Mother”s Day is a big flower holiday.
What would you recommend for Mother”s Day? What is a popular choice?
Well, with Mother”s Day, again you do roses, but you tend to do more mixes of roses, lilies, tulips. Those good spring flowers. Things that are coming onto the market. I don”t know if mothers like that or if people think mothers like that. They tend to get more of a variety of flowers instead of just one. What would you give your mother?
I don”t know. That”s why I was asking.
You know, that”s what we see. It”s a little more variety. And something, too, that has a little more of a keepsake value to it. A vase that they can keep, a remembrance. You tend to see that sort of thing on Mother”s Day.
Did I hear you also did an event in New York?
I did (in 2003). That was for The Sopranos. I”m all mobbed up.
Can you go into detail or were you sworn to secrecy?
Right. It”s one of those things that you can”t talk about. No, it was the season premiere of the fourth season of The Sopranos and they had an event at Rockefeller Center. They took over all of Rockefeller Center. They had 3,000 celebrities and we worked for 20 hours. My flower broker got me onto the team. I have a flower broker in New York. That was how I made the connection. So I went up and we worked 20 hours straight on that ice rink — that”s where it was, on a stage — and then we filled in the rooms and worked all night. We started at 1 a.m. and finished at 9 p.m. As the stars were coming in, we were going out the back. It was pretty interesting.
Do you do a lot of events like that?
We attend a lot of AIFD (American Institute of Floral Designers) functions. It”s an international organization. All of Mississippi State”s faculty is AIFD. We”re internationally certified.
So does the smell of all these flowers ever get to you?
You know, the breeding programs right now are sort of eliminating some of the fragrances. You have to really hunt for the flowers that have fragrances. I don”t even notice it. That”s a real shame when somebody walks in and says, ”Oh, it smells so good in here,” and you get so accustomed to the fragrance that you don”t even notice it. Isn”t that terrible? You sort of take it for granted.
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