A Rose Is Not a Rose

Ethel Merman's hotel room was teeming with magnolias, chrysanthemums and carnations to celebrate her San Francisco opening last week in Gypsy. Though allergic to flowers, Songstress Merman did not sneeze once. The flowers were all fake.

Artificial flowers for allergic actresses are only one use of the U.S.'s flowering bogus-blossom bloom. Imports from Italy and Hong Kong, which manufacture the bulk of the world's fake-flower output, have jumped more than 20 times since 1955. It is now a $50 million-a-year business. Of poor quality in the past, imitation lilacs, rhododendrons, geraniums, magnolias and orchids now look real enough to water--though lilies sometimes come with geranium leaves. Explains one Hong Kong exporter: "Sometimes God's product doesn't look natural enough, so we make hybrids." Some also come with built-in smell.

Plastic Green Thumbs. In hotels, offices, bars and restaurants, artificial blossoms have just about replaced the real thing. Many hotels order their phonies under a lease arrangement that calls for a seasonal change of blossoms to avoid having their lobbies decorated with poinsettias in July. In San Francisco some artists use the plastics for models in their still lifes. Texas housemaids dust the flowers weekly instead of changing the water daily. On the West Coast, green-thumbed weekend gardeners have been known to hoodwink their neighbors with lavish beds of plastic tulips. Tired of watching their natural flowers succumb to blight, drought or neighborhood dogs, many Detroiters have replaced them with artificial blooms to eliminate bare spots in their landscaping. One suburban Dallasite mixed a real and an imitation wisteria vine. "In the summer you can't tell one from the other," he says, "but it causes some questions in the winter when the artificial bush is still blooming."

Christmastime lovers nuzzle under plastic mistletoe, and brides are pelted with polyethylene orange blossoms. "It's got so that a girl only gets real flowers for her first corsage and at her funeral," says a Wichita florist. Some cemeteries forbid the use of fake flowers, not so much for reasons of taste as because they make it difficult to cut the grass. Other cemeteries have given in, allow plastic wreaths and sprays.

Soulless Permanents. The cost of buying perishable fresh flowers and the trouble of maintaining them have helped the fake-flower boom. Though plastic blossoms often cost more than real flowers, they rarely have to be replaced, never clipped. Chicago Motivation Researcher Irving S. White insists that people buy artificial flowers because "they are afraid of death. There is nothing so obviously symbolic of death as the wilting away of a flower. Artificial flowers give people a sense of security, a feeling that life and beauty will go on forever."

Fresh-flower partisans deplore the trend. "Plastic flowers don't have a soul," says Chicago Florist Audie Staup. "Real flowers have a message; plastic ones don't." Adds Edward Goeppner, managing partner of San Francisco's huge Podesta-Baldocchi florist firm: "I sometimes ask a friend who has artificial flowers in his home if he has a stuffed dog, too." Paradoxically, the bogus-blossom boom has not yet cut severely into fresh-flower sales. Explains Goeppner: "Artificial flowers remind one to buy fresh flowers." Nevertheless, most flower shops hedge their bets by stocking the phonies. "We never call them artificial flowers," says one florist. "We call them 'permanent' flowers. It sounds better."

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