Tube roses, gerberas and orchids add beauty to home & pandal decorations

Pune: Adorn your Ganesha idol with a combination of local blooms and exotic floral imports this festive season. Pune’s buzzing wholesale flower market in Market Yard is flooded with a wide variety of flowers right from the commonly used tube roses and gerberas to marigolds and chrysanthemums. “We sell flowers by the kg and we get a lot of demand from both households and bigger pandals during Ganeshotsav. This time, there is so much produce in the market that prices are trending lower than last year,” Santosh Wable, who runs Morya Flower Merchant in Market Yard, said.Most vendors are commission agents who get the flower produce directly from farmers. Owing to a high yield of marigold and tube roses, prices are trending 20-30% lower per kg over last year’s cost . “Last year, prices were between Rs 30-Rs 70 per kg across different varieties. This year, prices are in the range of Rs 10 to Rs 40 per kg on an average,” a seller said. The demand for flowers fluctuates during the festival and peaks during ‘Gauri aagman’ and during all visarjan days. “We have our own farms where we source local flowers from and also import orchids, different varieties of shewanti etc. People are using a combination of artificial flowers and other decorative items as well for pandal decoration,” Nikita Mohite, owner of Mohak Florist, said. On an average, almost every big flower seller in Market Yard sells as many as 6,000 to 8,000kg of flowers a day during Ganeshotsav. This number drops to 2,000 to 4,000kg during non-festival days. Most local flowers come from Satara, Urali Kanchan and Yavatmal. “Every day, we redecorate the mandir for our Ganapati idol at home. We buy flowers from the market according to the theme of the day. On the last day, we will do an all-orchid decoration,” Deepali Bende, a resident of Sahakarnagar, said. Flower sellers said that since the last year was first year of celebration after the pandemic, there were a lesser amount of flowers in the market and therefore prices were trending higher. However, this year there seems to be an excess. “There is likely to be some amount of wastage because farmers are saying that they have a lot of produce this year. People are also using a lot of artificial flowers for decorations so overall the demand has come down,” Sagar Bhosale, owner of Bhosale & Company, said.