Working

Ellen McCarty

SHE IS

Sprucing up the holidays.

THE SCENT OF A WOMAN

Roberts, 25, has lost her sense of smell.

“I have to stick my nose really close to the flowers to catch the scent,”

she said. “Other people come into the store and say, ‘It smells so

wonderful in here.’ I don’t even notice it anymore.”

For the last eight years, Roberts has created thousands of floral

arrangements, most recently at Fountain Valley Florist. Although her work

as a floral designer dulled her sense of smell, it sharpened her

intuitive sense of emotion.

“Flowers send emotion,” she said. “I spend more time talking to customers

than arranging the flowers, because I want to get the right emotion from

the person so I can express it to someone else.”

FLURRY OF FLOWERS

The holiday season is the busiest time of the year. Between Thanksgiving

and Christmas, Roberts typically makes hundreds of arrangements each day,

as opposed to the dozens required daily the rest of the year.

“I’ve worked a couple of 18-hour days in a row when it gets really busy,”

she said. “You don’t get to enjoy the holidays but you get to make

everyone else’s holidays special.”

Customers should order holiday flower arrangements early, she said, even

if they don’t intend to have the arrangement delivered until weeks later.

“It gets so swamped here with the phone ringing and so many arrangements

to do,” she said. “The more notice we have, the better.”

Although her hours are getting longer, Roberts’ customers are usually

pretty happy. “A few times, people have called me to tell me how much

they like my work and it just made it all worthwhile,” she said.

DISTINCT DECOR

When she first started arranging flowers in Palm Desert, where she grew

up, she stuck to the basics, but now more and more she finds herself

trying nontraditional holiday decorations.

“If a person’s home is blue and pink, they don’t have to have an orange

and brown centerpiece to look festive,” she said. “We can use wheat,

cattails, and dried lotus pods mixed in with flowers of any color to

create a fall feeling.”

Of course, if a customer does want traditional trends, Roberts has a

stockpile of orange leaves and pumpkins ready to please. Her specialty,

however, is candles.

Holding an exotic pink Protea, Roberts demonstrated how she can remove

the stamen and replace it with a candle, adding a pink glow to holiday

flower arrangements. Votive and taper candles can also be used, she said.

There are some evergreen decorations, good for any occasion.

“My favorite flower is a pink stargazer lily,” she said. “The shape and

fragrance is exquisite.”

SAVING GRACE

The staff is tight and last year, the store’s owner, Al Devile, had an

emergency right before Valentine’s Day.

“My wife had a baby on Feb. 10,” Devile said. “She ended up in the

emergency room for three weeks and almost died. I was at the hospital the

whole time.”

Luckily, doctors were able to save his wife’s life, and back at the

store, Roberts helped to save the business.

“The staff is small and my wife and I usually do everything from handling

phones and deliveries during the Valentine’s Day rush,” he said, “I don’t

know how the designers did it without us, but they did. We didn’t lose

any business during the busiest flower holiday of the year.”

Roberts said it was an easy decision to help her boss. “I got an extra

boost of energy, probably adrenaline,” she said, “and I just kept telling

myself that I could sleep after the rush was over.”