American Flags, Ecuadorian Roses Decorated Arlington National Cemetery for Memorial Day

Ramiro Peñaherrera, an Ecuadorean grower, distributed roses to visitors at Arlington National Cemetery for Memorial Day. Sixty-five farms in Ecuador donated 10,000 long-stemmed roses to honor soldiers.

Wednesday, 01 June 2011:
Arlington National Cemetery, always a dramatic site with its seemingly endless stretch of white grave markers on a sea of green, looked especially beautiful Monday with 10,000 long-stemmed roses decorating soldiers’ graves.

The roses, in myriad colors and varieties, came from 65 Ecuadorean flower farms, which traveled to Washington, D.C., courtesy of Centurian Air Cargo and Delaware Valley Floral Group. Ramiro “Robin” Peñaherrera, director of the educational program “Flowers for Kids” and president of LatinFlor S.A., a gypsophila farm, organized the effort, which has been in the works for three years. He and co-organizer Juan Abel Echeverría, director of logistics for the country’s floriculture association, Expoflores, marveled at the reaction the flowers brought visitors on Memorial Day.

“I’m familiar with Europeans’ love of flowers – but I never realized the positive emotional impact that flowers truly have on Americans!” Echeverría said.  

Peñaherrera, Echeverría and dozens of volunteers, which included representatives from the Washington Ballet, distributed the roses along with a card that said, “Please take one memorial rose to place on the grave of a loved one, another to take home in memory of that person.”

The card did not mention where the flowers came from, but word got out: Arlington National Cemetery, wishing to recognize the Ecuadoreans’ generosity, recognized them in a press release last week, in a YouTube video and on Facebook and Twitter. Several D.C. community publications, such as Georgetown Patch, covered the event, as did The Washington Post. In addition to the 10,000 roses, the group had 100 red, white and blue bouquets made of roses, delphinium and callas. They donated them to the “American Gold Star Mothers,” an organization of mothers who have lost a child in military service, who were honored during the Arlington Memorial Day service.

“The stories we heard … were overwhelming,” Peñaherrera said. When he asked a woman who passed by if she would like to decorate a grave, she said she’d already put flowers on her son’s grave. “So I just gave her a hug and another armful of roses,” he said. She responded: “This is really wonderful. My husband gave me flowers the day my son was born.”

Stories like that one were repeated over and over from 7 a.m., when the group started handing out roses, until 2 p.m., when they had all been distributed.  President Obama, following his formal wreath-laying speech at Arlington’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, visited Section 60 and spoke with some of the visitors.
“People took the flowers so carefully,” said Dean Rule, of Conectiflor S.A., who also participated in the effort.  It was “almost as if they had never been given a flower before,” he said. “And perhaps some of them had not.”

Pleased with Monday’s effort, Peñaherrera hopes to do it again, but bigger, in November.  “My real dream is for all of us – Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and U.S. flower growers — to join together . . . for Veterans’ Day 2011, maybe with schoolchildren organized to place the roses on the graves,” he said. “Can you imagine how wonderful it would be?”

—Lin Schmale
Senior Direct of Government Relations
Society of American Florists