A little more than a week before the 136th Tournament of Roses Parade, Bob Mellano was counting flowers and coming up short — 50,000 roses short.
Mellano studied his paperwork. A flower wholesaler in downtown Los Angeles, he can spot discrepancies from a distance.
The night before, two trucks from Miami had pulled up to his loading dock with dozens of pallets stacked with flower boxes. By the time his crew offloaded them, he could see that he was at least 250 boxes short — and that included the roses he especially needed, an award-winning variety known as Hearts.
Mellano, 62, concealed his worry behind years of experience. Within a week, the floats would be ready for their flowers and making up the difference would not be easy or cheap.
From his office on the second floor of the downtown Flower Market, Mellano stands in the middle of a global supply chain that extends into almost every continent and ends on New Year’s Day in Pasadena.
When others speak of holiday stress, he only wishes he had their stress. For as long as he can remember, November and December have been a blur of 14-hour days, meetings and phone calls, emails and texts, paperwork and floor work.
“Without the flowers,” he said, “the Rose Parade is nothing.”
The 2025 Rose Parade features 39 floats, and Mellano is supplying the flowers and foliage for 21.
Millions of strangers, hundreds of clients and dozens of employees depend upon him. The ghosts of his family depend on him: For two generations, Mellano & Co. has played a vital behind-the-scenes role in the Rose Parade.
Pacing the warehouse floor, Mellano ticked off items on the bill of lading.
In his business, thin margins are made thinner by mechanical breakdowns, labor strikes, fickle growers, fickle airlines, human error and inclement weather. This year, it has been raining a lot in Colombia, where most of his roses come from, and rain is terrible for roses.
He reviewed the quantities for one float — “Go Bowling” — that required 2,500 Hearts. Only 400 had arrived. The others were among the 50,000 missing roses.
Sometimes he wished he dealt in widgets. Widgets would be so much easier.
In the world of Rose Parade float design, roses — naturally — are superstars.
While designers enlist other flowers — along with seeds, bark, beans, coffee grounds, anything to meet the rule that every square inch of every float be covered with natural material — they value roses for their range of color, their versatility and durability.
Among these stars, the Hearts rose often plays the lead. Its deep crimson color and complex bloom — a crowded whorl of ruffled petals that coalesce in the center to form a heart — add an element of visual intrigue.
“It’s a gorgeous rose, deep red, not black, just a very, very deep red,” said Scott Lamb, floral director for the float designer Artistic Entertainment Services.
Lamb has worked on the Rose Parade for 52 years, decorating floats with the flowers that bring the fanciful tableaux and myriad menageries to life.
But the bowling alley that would be depicted on the “Go Bowling” float, sponsored by the Bowling Proprietors’ Assn. of America, especially intrigued him. Its mechanical elements — the wobbling pins in particular — add a unique dynamic.
John Harbuck, responsible for marketing the association, said the exposure provided by a Rose Parade float was worth a price tag “below the mid-six figures.”
In its planning stages, a float is a mathematical equation, where X is the number of flowers and Y is the square footage to be covered. Lamb added up the order he would send to Mellano.
- 500 stems of whaleback philodendron
- 825 stems of lavender cushion chrysanthemums (50,000 flowers)
- 3,650 stems of sprengeri ferns
- 21,800 red and yellow carnations
And of course, roses — lots and lots of roses.
“The float screamed roses,” said Lamb, calculating 36,800 stems.
For a broad swath of the bowling lane and the area below the ball and toppling pins, he chose the 2,500 Hearts, both long stems and short. They would add texture and drama: Think Roy Lichtenstein’s “Whaam!”
On a farm about 35 miles northeast of Bogotá, Hearts are grown in a greenhouse under carefully controlled conditions: a substrate of coconut peat fed by a hydroponic watering system in temperatures averaging 59 degrees, at an elevation of 9,000 feet.
For all its beauty, the variety began as a mistake, when Dutch breeder Jan Spek Rozen discovered unusual traits that an ordinary rose assumed when grown on the Andean plateau.
Growers at first were disappointed with the disorganized blooms, the tightly packed petals more akin to a wild than a garden rose.
But the ruffles found a market, and in 2009, Rozen patented Hearts, selling grafts to growers in Ecuador and Colombia, the only countries where the unusual traits could be achieved.
For the Hearts on the “Go Bowling” float, Mellano contacted Elite Flower, an international supplier based in Colombia.
On Dec. 13, workers clipped the Hearts. At El Dorado International Airport, they were loaded — along with 1,433 boxes of other flowers — onto Chilean airline LATAM Flight L7-2813, bound for Miami.
The flower business used to be simpler.
During his childhood on the family farm in Cerritos in the 1960s, Mellano delivered California-grown flowers with his brothers and father. He recalled, as a little boy, being dwarfed by the boxes.
The Rose Parade played a prestigious role in the business that his grandfather started 100 years ago. Giovanni Mellano emigrated from Italy and settled in Santa Cruz, making a living at first selling locally harvested floral greens to markets in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1925 and established Mellano & Co. in the Flower Market downtown. On six acres among the dairy farms of southeast L.A., he grew ferns, myrtle and eucalyptus.
The family opened a second farm in Artesia for daffodils and daisies, before the suburban sprawl pushed them out. In 1972, the Mellanos moved to Oceanside, where they still own 400 acres for asters, waxflowers, alstroemeria, delphiniums and foliage.
Float designs and floral orders once came in as early as July, giving local growers time to plant what would be needed in six months. But the price of land and labor pushed many domestic growers out of business, forcing flower suppliers to turn to overseas markets.
Today, roses sold in the U.S. are almost exclusively grown in Colombia and Ecuador. Exotic flowers, such as orchids, come from Hawaii or Thailand. Other countries — Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, South Africa, Kenya, Japan, Singapore, Costa Rica, Peru — are valuable sources.
As the Rose Parade has grown from a local to a national brand, sponsors take more time before committing to a float, deliberating costs, messaging and visibility. This year, one of Mellano’s orders arrived Dec. 16, leaving little room for error.
At a refrigerated warehouse at the Miami airport, Customs and Border Protection officials opened each box of Hearts, unwrapped the flowers and shook and banged them to see whether any unwanted insects fell out.
Days later, on Dec. 19 at a cold storage facility west of the airport, workers from Armellini Logistics sorted, consolidated, palletized, staged and loaded the flowers into two 53-foot refrigerated trailers.
Mellano prefers shipping overland for $8 a box; by air, it’s $43.
The trucks left four hours apart, and the drivers settled in for the 39-hour, 2,700-mile trip to Los Angeles on Interstate 10.
On Dec. 21 at 7 p.m., the first truck pulled its brakes at Mellano & Co. on Wall Street. The second truck arrived closer to midnight.
Mellano got up at 2 a.m., quietly so as to not disturb his wife, Mary. He credits her for making all this possible, raising their four sons and understanding the demands of a routine that keeps him busy from the winter holidays through the Lunar New Year, Valentine’s Day and Easter.
He dreamed of playing professional baseball but gave it up to work with his father and uncles. With his children uninterested in the business, he wonders what will become of the family’s investment in flowers.
Driving in from Fullerton, he was at the office by 3:30 a.m. After discovering that the 2,100 short-stemmed Hearts were missing, he called Elite.
The shortage, he was told, was a discrepancy in the paperwork. The rest of the roses would land in Miami the next day and be in Los Angeles on Thursday, the day after Christmas.
He was hardly assured. The clock was running down.
So when the third Armellini truck pulled into the loading dock, on Thursday as promised, Mellano was waiting. The 14 boxes of Hearts were there, as were the other 48,000 missing roses.
Mellano’s crew, dressed in company sweatshirts and caps, began preparing the flowers for delivery to the pavilion in Pasadena where volunteers decorate the floats.
As a corrido played in the background, Panfilo Maldonado and Juan Aleman worked silently, efficiently, opening boxes, spilling bundles over a long table, stripping out the cellophane. Aleman placed the roses on a conveyor belt, advancing them to a rotary saw that cut their stems.
Four-gallon buckets filled with water laced with sugar and bacteriacides were ready to receive the freshly trimmed flowers. Once in the water, the blossoms — dormant now for two weeks — began to freshen.
By Sunday night, the Hearts had been sitting in their buckets for two days in a drafty tent just south of the Rose Bowl.
Nearby in the Rosemont Pavilion, the “Go Bowling” float loomed along with 16 other fantastical creations: chipmunks sharing an acorn, the Little Tramp dancing with his girl, B.B. King hitting blue notes on Lucille.
Nicholas St. Clair, “Go Bowling’s” lead floral designer, carried the Hearts to the front of the bowling alley, its base half covered with sprengeri ferns.
Lamb watched as St. Clair cut the stem of each Heart at a 45-degree angle and added them to a lavish arrangement of brighter red roses, bird of paradise leaves, palm fans, steel grass and red dogwood.
Mellano and wife Mary stood nearby. He was still on call to field any last-minute requests, but the crush of the last week was easing. He surveyed the crowded warehouse, admiring creations that had once existed only on paper.
“Nothing compares to the Rose Parade once you see those floats coming down Colorado Boulevard,” he said.
On New Year’s Day, though, after so many sleepless nights, he’ll watch the parade on television at home.