Business is blooming

Still, Boston Flower Market was far from placid yesterday afternoon. Employees at the South End company were busy unloading more than 400 boxes of tulips from trucks, and designers arranged more than 2,000 roses into bouquets. But it wasn’t the usual rush of simultaneous walk-ins, and home and office deliveries that typifies the busiest time of year for florists.

Yesterday, the shop made the bulk of its deliveries to offices. Today and tomorrow, Stephansky said, employees will make home deliveries and handle walk-in purchases.

Their best-selling arrangement, recession or not, is a dozen red, long-stemmed roses for $60.

“Of course it’s roses, it always is roses,’’ Stephansky said.

But at Winston Flowers, a high-end chain of six Massachusetts shops, people aren’t just buying roses. The Ruby Sweetheart, a $90 arrangement of red and pink roses with fuchsia orchids, has surpassed the classic order of a dozen roses, which costs about $100, said Julie Sullivan, Winston’s director of sales and opera tions.

And with the economy on the mend, more people are buying flowers for their sweethearts.

Sales at Winston Flowers are up about 10 to 12 percent from last Valentine’s Day, Sullivan said. For the 10 days leading up to Sunday, the company hired 75 seasonal workers to supplement its workforce of 220.

Valentine’s Day falling on a weekend allows the company’s headquarters more time to process and deliver the 6,500 delivery orders it gets, Sullivan said. In past years, employees have had to defer orders from headquarters to the other Winston Flowers locations in the Financial District and suburbs.

So who will be getting flowers? According to the trade group Society of American Florists, 48 percent of arrangements will be sent to spouses and 27 percent will be sent to mothers.

And 8 percent of buyers - nearly all of them women - will be sending flowers to someone extremely close: themselves.

Tziperman Lotan can be reached at gtzipermanlotan@globe.com.