The cut flower industry is finally beginning to wake up and smell the roses, reports the New York Times. There is money to be made selling organic and sustainably raised flowers.

Lovely, as far as it goes, but like the organic spinach that goes from California to New York, most of those flowers are going a lot farther than necessary.

And of course choices are severely limited; Do not look to online flower sources for combinations like this

Bonica rose and old fashioned lady’s mantle(in garden, but it could have been in vase)

As local tomatoes and strawberries make clear, splendor and short travel time go hand in hand. Same deal with flowers: the closer you can get to homegrown the tastier your options will be.

This is not news to most of you, including Rachael and Jesse, who wrote in last week looking for

“someone in the Hudson valley - Orange, Putnam or Rockland or Westchester - that sells or uses organic or locally grown flowers. We’re having an event early July/late June and would love to support local.”

Having been out of the event racket for over 25 years, I have zip in the way of firsthand info. (if you have any, send it in!), but I can suggest something almost as good and a great deal more widely useful: a visit to Local Harvest, where the national database is searchable by location, crop and type of vendor. A trial request for farms + flowers + Warwick ( the first place I could think of in Orange county) brought up 57 listings and there was a flower farm on the first page so it’s probably one of many.

Finding your perfect match is unlikely to be instant , especially if you use the shopping tips below. It’ll take even longer if you take my advice and cover your posterior by ordering everything you need from two different farms. It’ll cost more too, obviously, but when the event is important it’s worth having insurance.

Most retail flower farms are small; weather is highly variable – a hailstorm might hit one location and leave one 10 miles away unscathed - and in real life, manure happens. Worst case, you’ll have done even more for local farms and will have extras to give away. Flowers for those who’ve helped with the event is always nice, or you could donate them to your local food bank. People who can’t afford enough to eat have probably gone without cut flowers for quite a while.

Flower Farm Shopping Tips:

* Does the grower sell by single variety or single color or, ideally, both? If so, is the price per stem or per bunch and if the latter how large is a bunch?

* Does the grower offer unusual fillers like the lady’s mantle above or the artemisia below?

That’s Queen Anne’s lace being a weed in the artemisia ‘Silver King’, an equally pernicious invader. Plant it once, have it for all time.

* Be sure timing is agreed upon. It’s best to cut flowers in the morning and keep them cool, but the grower may not have much in the way of ideal storage space. The sooner you can pick them up, the sooner you can get them home for proper conditioning.

Last Minute LOCAL Flowers for Valentine’s Day in the Hudson Valley

Yes we can! Rhinebeck’s famous violets have gone the way of les neiges d’antan, but there are two surviving hothouses that grow beautiful anemones and sell them retail, first come first served:

Battenfeld’s and Ralph Pitcher & Sons, (845) 876-3974

An anemone at Battenfeld’s

Well, one good thing to be said for procrastination – at least when it comes to making the case for More Local Food – is that if you just wait a little while, the inimitable Michael Pollan will do all the research and then say, far better than you could, more or less what you planned to say when you got around to it. Pretty much everything (except growing instructions) is right there in The Vegetable Industrial Complex, in the 10/15/06 NYTimes magazine.

More on strawberries - and cream - shortly. Meanwhile a bit of garden serendipity. Was just weeding under the plum trees and came across this souvenir of late last year who knows when. Leaf is a bit of garlic mustard – evil weed! Beetle genus and species a mystery but if you take that metallic blue and pump it up tenfold you’ll see what I saw - tiny and shining in the shifting shade.

Maple syrup info on tap for Sunday.

Or almost, anyway… The Hanukkah and Kwanzaa teams are not yet completely out of the woods, so for their sakes – and while I’m thinking about it – here are a few rules to wrap by if you’re keen to save a tree without having the presents look frumpy:

1. We are still waiting for the day when earth-friendly inclinations in this department are universally understood and admired. When in doubt, either go the safe route with new (recycled-content) paper; wrap the present in something else that is itself a present - a pretty new dish towel is the classic - or else don’t wrap it at all. The arts and crafts approach - using the funny papers, for instance – is as useful for saving money as it is for saving resources, so if you’re not careful it can just make you look cheap instead of green.

2. Homemade wrappings are only a good choice if you are good at these things and have plenty of time on your hands. My stepdaughter Celia makes such lovely collages out of bits of bark, twigs and old magazines we hate to open her presents, but if you’re not craftily inclined you end up with yet one more thing to do, and one more thing to feel inadequate about if you’re older than 10.

3. Reusing is more resource-protective than recycling, but it works best if you think of it before you’re sitting there surrounded by billowing waves of torn wrapping. Some tips:

* Tape is the enemy of paper, so before you start cutting and folding, stick a whole row of small tape pieces to the edge of a plate. If it’s easy to use less, you will.

* Consider reuse when buying paper. Mylar is difficult to crease, so if you don’t work at creasing it, it will come off the package looking as smooth as it did when it went on. Tissue paper wrinkles at the mere thought of being used, but tissue paper looks good wrinkled — if the wrinkling is thorough enough. Crush slightly-used paper into balls so it’s well and truly crinkly, like shirred fabric, then use multiple layers and multiple colors to give a festive effect.

* If you are, as I am, a sucker for gorgeous paper that has no redeeming social value outside of being beautiful, you can still amass plenty of green points by reusing as much of it as possible. The trick is to have a cardboard wrapper tube ( or tubes) handy at present-opening time, so you can roll up the used paper before some helpful relative folds it tightly into neat, deeply creased piles. Most of the smooth paper it takes to wrap a large box will remain completely new-looking if you rescue it in time. We keep this going until the smooth pieces are so small all you can wrap is a candy bar - an excellent present, by the way, if it’s something from Michel Cluizel.