Instead of enjoying three days of relaxation on Memorial Day weekend, Brent Meisinger worked 20 hours a day this past week preparing floral arrangements.

While it’s not a typical work week, Meisinger and other employees at Mountain Bloom put in plenty of overtime to make sure grocery stores across the Wasatch Front would have enough flowers for Memorial Day patrons.

Preparations for Memorial Day, the third largest holiday for the wholesale flower company, just behind Valentines Day and Mothers Day, started a month in advance with orders coming in from stores as far away as Logan to the north, Price to the south and Vernal to the west.

Employees at the company described the rush before the holiday as “a lot of hours, little sleep.”

And while only the managers at Mountain Bloom worked the extreme amount of hours that Meisinger worked, starting at 2 a.m. and continuing until 10 p.m., other employees put in their fair share of labor.

Emily Gerratt, a floral designer at Mountain Bloom only worked 40 hours throughout the process, but said she really liked the busy atmosphere while preparing the flowers for the holiday.

“It kept us really busy,” she said. “It really went by fast.”

Throughout the week leading up to Memorial Day, Meisinger managed a crew of about 40 people working in an assembly line of floral arrangers, including students taking a floral design class at BYU.

Starting with the green foam base, designers insert the greenery first and then push the unfinished arrangement down an assembly line to others who add a variety of flowers, including gladiolas, football mums, daisies and chrysanthemums.

With each arrangement, the overall design of the four different sized arrangements stayed the same to keep the process simple. Only the colors of the flowers changed from one arrangement to the next. Each arrangement would take 15 to 20 minutes to create on the assembly line.

“It was so organized, very smooth,” Garrett said. “That’s how it got done so fast.”

Despite the large number of arrangements crafted last week, Meisinger said Memorial Day arrangements were actually easier because of their large size.

“The bigger the arrangement gets, the easier it is to do,” he said.

Even though most of the arrangements were completed and shipped out by Saturday, Mountain Bloom continued to receive orders for more flowers as late as Saturday morning.

In the week and a half it took to prepare the 2,000 Memorial Day orders, employees used more than 2,000 football mums and 2,500 stems of chrysanthemums to decorate the bouquets.

Each holiday is different, as are the flowers people request, Meisinger said. Valentine’s Day is usually filled with roses, and Mother’s Day generally consists of carnations in various colors.

Memorial Day flowers, in contrast, consist of larger flowers like mums and chrysanthemums because they last longer in the hot temperatures outside in cemeteries, he said.

Utahns are abnormal in their big observance of the holiday commemorating the service given by American war veterans. Meisinger, originally from Montana, said it is unusual to see so many people celebrating Memorial Day in other parts of the nation.

“It’s a phenomenon here,” he said.

In most parts of the country, the holiday doesn’t garner much attention, but in Utah he said he’s seen many families visiting cemeteries and honoring family and friends who have passed, Meisinger said.

“Memorial Day is a unique experience in Utah,” Meisinger said. “[It] is bigger here than anywhere else in the country.”



Copyright Brigham Young University 31 May 2005