Costa Rican flower and foliage sector shows its variety and beauty in floral design workshops

• Costa Rican designer María del Mar Gómez was in charge of showing applications to the North American buyers.

San José, June 18, 2021. The country’s tropical flowers and foliage sector showed this week its diversity and different uses for its products through floral design workshops with buyers from the United States and Canada, with the aim of promoting trends, new applications and color palettes, to generate more business for the seven national companies that participated.

The products used during the workshops were foliage such as: cordyline leaves and tips, dracaena song of India and song of Jamaica, white sanderiana, monstera, among others. As well as tropical flowers such as heliconia and heliconia psittacorum, musa, bird of paradise, ginger and ginger shampoo, costus, etc.

According to Álvaro Piedra, the Foreign Trade Agency of Costa Rica’s Export Director, this is one of the sectors that was most affected last year due to the pandemic, however, it has proven to be resilient and capable of excelling in international markets.

“As of the first four months of 2021, products such as ornamental plants exported $37 million, $8 million more than in the same period of 2020. Flowers and buds, meanwhile, had a growth of $4.5 million, going from $8.7 million from January to April 2020 to $13.3 million in 2021, while foliage and leaves went from $9.1 million in the first quarter of 2020 to $11.5 million in 2021. These numbers fill us with hope and motivate us to continue working on strategies to promote and position this sector, to continue generating business,” said Piedra.

The workshops, called “Tropical Dreams by Essential Costa Rica”, were led by floral designer María Del Mar Gómez, from JUNO, a firm dedicated to art, fashion, and floral and botanical design. Gomez said that Costa Rica’s tropical flowers and foliage, because of their sizes, shapes, and colors, provide a contrast and design opportunities very different from those of traditional flowers and have the advantage of a much longer shelf life.

“We hope that these workshops have inspired floral designers around the world to experiment more with tropical flowers and foliage and include them in their design repertoire,” the floral designer added.

The workshops were held with the support of the Foreign Trade Agency of Costa Rica’s Trade Promotion Offices (TPOs) in the United States (Miami, Houston, and New York) and Canada, and were attended by some 60 buyers from these markets.