Lily of the Valley: Why It Costs What It Does

Lily of the valley is the most expensive flower per visible square inch that we sell, and the question that follows the quote is always the same. It is a small white bell on a short stem. Why does a modest bunch cost what a substantial arrangement of roses costs?

The answer is genuinely interesting, and worth knowing before you decide whether you want it.

What it is

Convallaria majalis is a low woodland perennial that spreads by rhizome, throws up a pair of broad leaves and a single arching stem of six to twelve nodding white bells, and does all of this for about three weeks a year. In this region that window is late April into early May. It is intensely fragrant — green, sweet, slightly soapy — and the scent is the reason it has been in bridal work for four centuries.

Why it is expensive

Four reasons compound.

The natural season is three weeks long. Outside it, every stem you see has been forced — rhizomes lifted, chilled for months to simulate winter, then brought into heat on a schedule. That is a slow, labour-intensive, mostly Dutch industry, and it prices accordingly.

Every stem is picked by hand, individually. There is no mechanised harvest for a plant that grows in a low mat and is destroyed by being walked on.

The yield per plant is tiny. One rhizome gives you one stem. A bridal bouquet of nothing but lily of the valley can consume several hundred stems, which is why those bouquets — Grace Kelly's in 1956, Catherine Middleton's in 2011 — are famous partly for what they cost.

It does not travel or hold well. Short vase life, high wastage, air freight. The price has to absorb the stems that do not survive the trip.

What you actually get for it

Four to six days in the vase, sometimes a little more if it is kept genuinely cool. It is a short-lived flower and no amount of technique changes that materially.

What you get in exchange is a fragrance nothing else replicates and a visual quality — small, white, nodding, unfussy — that reads as expensive precisely because it is not showy. It is the opposite of a statement flower. It is a flower that people who already have flowers ask for.

Keeping it alive

• Cool, always. This is a woodland-floor plant. Room temperature in a heated house is already stressful; a sunny windowsill kills it in a day.
• Shallow water, changed daily. The stems are soft and foul water quickly.
• Do not mix it with much. It is short and it is delicate, and it disappears next to anything with mass.
• Recut on arrival and give it an hour in deep cool water in a dark place before arranging. It rehydrates noticeably.

Sold with its own leaves, which is how it is usually presented, it does not need any other foliage. The two broad leaves wrapped around the stems are the traditional presentation and it has not been improved on.

The May 1 tradition

In France, La Fête du Muguet on 1 May is a national flower-giving day built entirely around this plant. The custom is generally traced to Charles IX in 1561, and on that one day French law permits individuals to sell muguet on the street without a licence — which is why the pavements of Paris fill with people holding buckets of it. Sprigs are given to family, colleagues and neighbours as a token of luck.

If you are French, or sending to someone who is, 1 May without muguet lands the way Valentine's Day without flowers lands. It is worth knowing, and worth ordering early, because the global supply concentrates on that single date and the DC allocation is not large.

Toxicity — this one is serious

Lily of the valley contains cardiac glycosides throughout the plant, including the berries and the water it has been standing in. It is genuinely dangerous to cats, dogs and small children — not "causes an upset stomach" dangerous, but affects-the-heart dangerous. The vase water is the underrated hazard, because a curious animal will drink it.

We will not send it into a household with pets or toddlers without saying this first. If that describes the recipient, a Pet-Friendly Blush Garden gives you the same soft white-and-blush register with none of the risk.

What to send instead, when the answer is no

If the season has passed or the budget will not carry it, the honest substitutes work on fragrance rather than appearance, because nothing looks like lily of the valley. White Lisianthus gives you the same restrained white and lasts three times as long. Freesia or stock will carry the scent role. Our The Classic White is the arrangement people usually mean when they ask for something quiet and expensive-looking in white.

And if it is for a wedding: ask your florist in autumn, not in spring. A May bouquet with real muguet in it is a sourcing decision made months ahead, and the studios that deliver it are the ones that booked the stems before Christmas.