Anniversary Flowers: How Many Roses for Which Year
Stem count as a message, the traditional flower for each anniversary year, and what to do when the number gets impractical.
There are two systems for anniversary flowers, and they conflict. Here is both, plus what to do when neither quite works.
System one: stem count as the number of years
Simple and legible. One rose per year of marriage. Ten years, ten roses; twenty years, twenty.
It works beautifully up to about year twenty-five and then becomes a logistics problem. Forty roses is a substantial bouquet; fifty is a two-handed object; by year sixty you are sending something that will not fit through a doorway.
Where it excels is the early years, when the number is small and the gesture is specific. Three roses for a third anniversary reads as thought rather than as a default dozen.
System two: the traditional flower for each year
Older, less known, and more interesting. The commonly cited list:
- 1st — carnation
- 2nd — lily of the valley
- 3rd — sunflower
- 4th — geranium
- 5th — daisy
- 6th — calla lily
- 7th — freesia
- 8th — lilac
- 9th — bird of paradise
- 10th — daffodil
- 11th — tulip
- 12th — peony
- 13th — chrysanthemum
- 14th — dahlia
- 15th — rose
- 20th — aster
- 25th — iris
- 30th — lily
- 40th — gladiolus
- 50th — yellow rose and violet
Two honest caveats. The list is not ancient — much of it is 20th-century florist convention rather than deep tradition. And several of these are difficult or impossible to source in Bangkok: lily of the valley, lilac, daffodil and peony are either unavailable or ruinously expensive here.
Use it as inspiration, not instruction. If the flower for your year is unavailable, nobody will know.
What we actually recommend
Years 1–15: use the stem count. It is legible, it is personal, and the numbers are practical. Add the traditional flower as an accent if it is available.
Years 20 and up: switch to a milestone bouquet. Rather than counting to thirty-eight, send something substantial and let the card do the arithmetic. A fifty-stem bouquet for a fiftieth is a genuine statement; a thirty-eight-stem bouquet for a thirty-eighth is just a big bouquet.
Round-number years deserve escalation. Ten, twenty-five, forty and fifty carry weight. This is where a hundred roses makes sense — not as excess, but because the number itself is the message.
Colour
Red is conventional and correct for anniversaries. But consider:
Deep pink for a long marriage often reads warmer than red, and photographs better.
White and pink for a milestone year is more elegant than red and is what we send most often for twenty-five and fifty.
The colour of the wedding flowers, if anyone remembers them. This is the single most effective anniversary bouquet there is, and it costs nothing extra to ask.
The card matters more than the flowers
For anniversaries specifically. A bouquet with "Happy Anniversary" on the card is a transaction. A bouquet with a specific memory on the card is a gift.
We write cards by hand. Give us the sentence; it does not need to be elegant.
Practical notes
Order the day before if the anniversary matters. Same-day works — we take orders until 9 pm — but a date you have known about for a year deserves not being a scramble.
Deliver to the office in the morning, not to home in the evening, if you want it seen. If you want it private, the reverse.
If you are together on the day, buy them yourself and bring them. Delivered flowers to someone in the same house is a strange gesture.
Start with the rose collection, or tell us the year and the story and we will build against it.