Originally published Saturday, February 8, 1997

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

There's always a little bit of spring on Kathleen's corner of Lower Queen Anne Hill.

Even when folks were slogging their way through slush and snow along Mercer Street in the early-morning dark, Kathleen Bettencourt was cheerfully opening boxes of daffodils.

And irises and mums and roses. Yes, always roses, the specialty of all the Larry's Markets floral departments. Most weeks, this bright and bustling little operation tucked into a stairway courtyard below First Avenue North and Mercer Street sells at least 1,000 roses.

This next Valentine's Day week, they will probably sell 7,000 long-stem roses. That's more than twice the number of lattes sold at the very busy latte and beverage counter on the main aisle opposite Kathleen's little corner.

Downtown, they're finishing up another gigantic Northwest Flower and Garden Show. Up on Lower Queen Anne, there's a slightly smaller flower show every day on the calendar. And you're allowed to touch the flowers on Mercer Street.

From Kathleen's side of the counter, where she's almost always up to her elbows in ferns, flowers and fussy tied bows, it's the customers that make this a very special place. "When someone stops to tell me how pleased they were with a bouquet or arrangement we made for them, well, that's the biggest satisfaction for me," she said, smiling.

That smile, that satisfaction, and the non-stop energy and optimism built into this transplanted Californian takes the cold edge off all those 4:30 mornings when she's taking the daily deliveries from the wholesaler trucks backed up to the Mercer Street sidewalk.

Forty-hour weeks are the short ones when you're manager with only one full-time and one part-time assistant. The flower shop in this Larry's Market opens at 6 a.m. and bustles till midnight during the week, 7 or 8 p.m. on the weekend.

Kathleen has to do a little and a lot of everything, from arranging and rearranging the various containers and shelves, taking and making RedBook floral wire orders around the country, to making arrangements and bouquets for local businesses.

Restaurants, private dining rooms, business offices, even the dressing rooms of stars appearing at nearby theaters all are enhanced by cut flowers, bouquets and arrangements created up on Mercer Street. When an operatic diva receives an armful of roses at curtain call down the street, chances are the roses have been selected and arranged just up Mercer.

Local sports stars also drop by for flowers. "A surprising number of men shop for flowers all the time," Kathleen said. "There are still the occasional men shopping for 'doghouse bouquets,' when they're in trouble at home. But lots of men want flowers in their homes and offices, and they're very good flower shoppers."

Each weekday morning, or as often as she can, Kathleen personally shops the local floral wholesalers for the freshest and best buys, maybe something just a little bit different. And then it's back to Mercer Street for picky-picky culling of any less-than-wonderful blossoms. "If I wouldn't buy it, it shouldn't be out here," Kathleen says. "Then again, it shouldn't be out here if I'm ordering right in the first place!"

She says she might come by all this naturally "because my dad's always been a very active gardener, back home in the little farming community of Newman, Calif." Kathleen graduated in ornamental horticulture from Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo.

And she was happy working as a consultant in California until she visited a sister in Seattle "and she said: 'You've gotta go see one of our Larry's,'" Kathleen recalled. Not long after that, she saw a Help Wanted ad for the floral shop at the Larry's at Oak Tree Plaza on Aurora Avenue North. "I guess it was meant to be," she said, explaining how she moved to the newer Mercer Street store several years later.

But she's a working, hands-on manager ... to the point that she might shyly tuck her hands beneath a counter because they are calloused and cut and stained with dirt and the juices of hundreds of cut flowers. Because there's so little space, cut flowers have become a specialty here. And roses, at $1.88 per long-stem and $18.98 per dozen, all must be butt-cut again between the wholesale box and Kathleen's floor, courtyard and refrigerator displays.

Yesterday's roses might find their way into a local nursing home, or a children's program. Very, very little here goes into anyone's mulch pile. As has become common practice in most floral operations, tied bunches of faded roses hang drying from ceiling racks, giving Kathleen's corner a sort of country market atmosphere.

"At this time of year, and again in the fall, the courtyard is just sunny and cool enough to make great storage and display space," she said. "People like to browse ... pick a flower or two from one container here, then maybe one of those from over there.

"We might go over and ask them if they need help, or maybe suggest something that would go good with whatever they've picked," Kathleen said. "It's great fun to help them create something, and we encourage them to select on their own. But we also have quite a number of very knowledgeable customers who know exactly what they want. They even know the proper Latin nomenclature for all the varieties."

Which is saying something, because this Larry's has dozens of varieties. "Some people particularly like the tropicals, like the orchids -- we usually have at least three or four varieties -- and the proteus, wild ginger, bird of paradise, that sort of thing," she said.

And a surprising number of flower-shoppers follow their noses. "Some of the fragrance favorites are stock, and always wax flowers, with their lemony smell," Kathleen said. "Also the so-called tuberose, some of the big oriental lilies, and the tulips and daffodils." When local field tulips and daffs come to market, you'll typically get twice the number of stems for $3.98 than you see in markets now.

It isn't the Skagit Valley at cutting time, but Kathleen's corner of fresh cut flowers is a little Queen Anne bright spot year-round.

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.