By TOM CALLIS
By TOM CALLIS
Tribune-Herald staff writer
With Mother’s Day just around the corner, a small warehouse outside Hilo hums with activity.
An unabated sense of urgency mixes in the air with the scent of thousands of tropical flowers as workers clean, trim and package a seemingly endless supply of colorful foliage with the efficiency of any production line.
For Green Point Nurseries owner Eric Tanouye, and hundreds of other Big Island flower growers, it’s a welcomed sight.
Mother’s Day is the busiest and most profitable holiday for nursery owners, who see it as their best chance of the year to make it big.
It also represents a reliable shot in the arm for an industry that saw its exports drop during the recession.
“When the economy is down, you rely on the months when you have the demand,” Tanouye said.
Flowers sales in Hawaii County declined nearly 25 percent in 2008, according to the Hawaii Department of Agriculture.
Numbers from the past few years weren’t available, but Tanouye, who is also president of the Hawaii Floraculture and Nursery Association, said the market has since bottomed out.
“We feel like we are coming back,” he said.
This week, the recession certainly seems like history for the flower industry.
To meet the holiday rush, nursery owners say many of their employees are working 12-plus hour days making sales calls all over the United States and packaging orders.
“It’s a case where in essence the amount of business we do more or less doubles,” said Grayson Inouye, owner of Pacific Floral Exchange.
“The only way to do that is to work twice as long.”
Tanouye said his employees, whom he called the “unsung heroes,” will package as many as 40 bouquets in an hour.
His salesman also work hard, he said, with their days starting as early as 4 a.m. in order to reach markets on the east coast.
Tanouye estimated that his 25-acre operation will deliver as many as a million stems to grateful mothers throughout the mainland.
But not all nurseries are seeing high times right now.
Orchid grower Jeff Newman said his crop was hindered by a cool winter this year.
“This year was kind of slower for us,” he said.
“So unfortunately, the bulk of our product will come in after Mother’s Day.”
Still, Newman said he wasn’t worried, noting he expects a better holiday next year.
While flowers make a natural gift, Hawaii’s blossoms make each bouquet unique, Tanouye said, after picking up an order form for a woman in Wisconsin.
“She is going to open a box not from Florida, not from California, but from Hawaii,” he said.
“That is bragging rights.”
For the holiday, anthuriums remain their most popular item, Inouye and Tanouye said.
The plant, known for its heart-shaped petals, comes in every color imaginable.
Anthuriums dressed in shades of reds, greens, pinks, purples and even white covered the center of Tanouye’s warehouse on Tuesday.
They totaled 1,000, he said, half of which would be gone by the end of the day.
Tanouye said he adds a new variety of anthurium each year to his catalog to remain competitive.
“That is so vital to our industry,” he said, while showing off his newest edition, the Gypsy, which hosts green and pink petals.
But 2012 may not be its year.
Tanouye said flowers with tangerine are most in demand right now.
“You can’t always predict the color,” he shrugged.
Email Tom Callis at tcallis@hawaiitribune-herald.com.