Just Because flowers in Rochester

Rochester is the only city on this map that renamed itself after a flower. Through the early 1800s it was the Flour City — the Genesee River drops nearly 300 feet inside the city limits, and the mills on those falls milled more wheat than anywhere in the country. Then the mills moved west and the nurseries took over: George Ellwanger and Patrick Barry opened Mount Hope Nurseries in 1840 on the slopes south of downtown and grew it into one of the largest nursery operations in the world, shipping trees and roses out of Rochester by rail and catalog until the city was known as the Flower City instead. The two of them later handed the city the first parcel of what became Highland Park, laid out with Frederick Law Olmsted's involvement, and the lilac collection planted there is the reason a hundred thousand people walk the same hillside every May for the Lilac Festival. The neighborhood below it still carries the nurserymen's names on its street signs, and Sacred Heart Cathedral sits on a street called Flower City Park. None of that history makes a bouquet cheaper. What it does mean is that sending flowers for no reason at all is not an eccentric gesture in this city — it is closer to a local habit, and the eight studios on the Rochester grid do a large share of their volume on exactly those orders.