A century after a grieving daughter chose white carnations to honour her mother, a different bloom has quietly displaced the official flower of Mother’s Day — and the story of how it did so reveals as much about culture as it does about horticulture
The flower that was not supposed to win
Mother’s Day has an official flower. It is not the peony. In 1908, Anna Jarvis — the West Virginia activist who organised the first formal Mother’s Day celebration at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton — distributed 500 white carnations to the congregation, one for each mother in attendance, in memory of her own mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, for whom the carnation had been a favourite. The choice was intimate and personal. Its symbolism was elaborated afterwards: Jarvis explained that she had chosen the carnation because, unlike most flowers, its petals cling together as it dies rather than falling separately — a quality she read as analogous to maternal love. Whiteness, she said, “stands for purity; its lasting qualities, faithfulness; its fragrance, love.” In the mid-1940s, the carnation was formally dubbed the official Mother’s Day flower, and the designation has never been revoked.
And yet, ask a florist in London, Sydney, New York, or Tokyo what her customers request by name in the fortnight before Mother’s Day, and the answer is rarely carnations. When it comes to flower type, it’s hard to beat peonies. At Arena Flowers, at their peak this year, peonies made up 75% more of their sales than the year before, and the company reported they still couldn’t get enough of them. Among the most searched-for flowers the week leading up to Mother’s Day are roses, peonies, hydrangeas, and sunflowers — a list notably dominated by flowers that carry no official designation whatsoever.
The story of how the peony arrived at this position — unofficial, unchosen by any historical founding figure, entirely absent from the early decades of Mother’s Day tradition — is a story about the intersection of aesthetics, social media, consumer behaviour, and a plant that managed, against considerable botanical odds, to be available at precisely the right moment.
Part one: the symbolism that preceded the trend
Before the peony became a social media phenomenon, it was already carrying an enormous weight of meaning. Much of this symbolic freight came not from the Western tradition but from China, where the peony has been cultivated for more than three thousand years and occupies a position in the cultural imagination roughly equivalent to that of the rose in Europe — the definitive flower of beauty, wealth, and honour.
Peonies have been cultivated in China since as early as 1,000 BCE, where they are symbols of wealth and honour. They eventually made their way to Europe and the United States, becoming especially popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Peonies are traditionally seen as a symbol of prosperity and good fortune, making them a meaningful choice for Mother’s Day celebrations. With their lush and delicate scent, peonies represent the grace that is often associated with motherhood.
This symbolic association with prosperity and maternal grace is not incidental to the peony’s rise on Mother’s Day — it is foundational to it, particularly in Chinese, Korean, and broader East Asian markets, where the flower’s cultural pre-eminence made its adoption for Mother’s Day feel less like a commercial trend than a natural extension of existing meaning. The peony’s association with Mother’s Day in China and among Chinese diaspora communities is grounded in the flower’s pre-existing cultural identity as the emblem of wealth, beauty, and abundance.
In the Western tradition, the peony acquired its own symbolic associations over centuries of cultivation in European gardens. By the Victorian era, when the language of flowers — floriography — was at its most elaborate and socially significant, the peony had come to represent bashfulness, compassion, and happy marriage. These were not maternal qualities in any specific sense, but they were tender ones, well-suited to a holiday organised around the expression of affection within a family. The Victorian peony was a garden flower of wealth and leisure, associated with the kind of abundant, well-tended domestic life that the emerging Mother’s Day holiday was itself celebrating.
What the peony did not have, entering the twentieth century, was any specific association with mothers. That association would be built not through tradition but through commerce, culture, and the particular aesthetics of the early twenty-first century.
Part two: the calendar coincidence
The peony’s rise as a Mother’s Day flower was assisted, in no small part, by a piece of botanical good fortune: it blooms in May.
This sounds trivially obvious, but its commercial implications are significant. Mother’s Day falls on the second Sunday of May in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and most of the countries that celebrate it — a date that corresponds almost precisely with the peak of the peony’s natural blooming season in temperate climates. The flower does not need to be forced out of season, imported from a distant hemisphere, or coaxed into premature bloom to appear on a florist’s shelf in time for Mother’s Day. In late April and early May, it is simply available, abundantly and at its best.
This is commercially significant for reasons that go beyond mere convenience. A flower that is naturally in season for a major holiday is a flower at the peak of its quality — maximum stem length, maximum fragrance, maximum bloom size, minimum supply disruption. It is also, in most cases, a flower at its most affordable relative to the rest of the calendar, since supply is at its annual high. For florists constructing value propositions for Mother’s Day bouquets, the coincidence of peak quality and peak availability is a compelling combination. The peony, at Mother’s Day, offers more flower per pound or dollar than at any other point in the year.
The seasonality of the peony also carries a subtler appeal that became increasingly commercially significant as consumer attitudes toward sustainability and provenance shifted over the course of the 2010s. A flower bought in season, from a local or regional grower, is a flower with a smaller carbon footprint and a shorter supply chain than the same flower forced out of season and flown in from Ecuador or Kenya. As the slow flowers movement — which advocates for locally grown, seasonally appropriate alternatives to the globally traded cut flower — gathered momentum in the United States and United Kingdom, the peony’s natural alignment with the Mother’s Day calendar became a point of active promotion rather than mere coincidence.
Part three: what social media did
The peony’s aesthetic rise is inseparable from the rise of visual social media, and specifically from the explosion of platforms whose architecture rewards images of exceptional visual richness: Instagram from around 2012, Pinterest throughout the decade, and TikTok from 2019 onward.
The peony is, by any objective measure, a highly photogenic flower. Its bloom is large, densely petalled, and architecturally complex — offering the kind of visual depth that rewards close-up photography and that reads with equal force on a smartphone screen as on a florist’s display. Its colour range, running from the deepest burgundy through every shade of pink and coral to the purest white, maps almost perfectly onto the soft, warm, saturated palettes that dominated Instagram aesthetics through the 2010s. And it has a quality that floristry professionals describe as “movement” — a sense that the flower is actively unfolding, that its petals are caught in some moment of becoming — that translates extraordinarily well to still photography.
Global online searches for peonies recorded a 175% increase according to two years of Google search data analysed by Arena Flowers — capturing the top spot among all flowering plants. “Peonies continue to grow in popularity,” said Ginny Henry, Arena Flowers’ creative lead.
The timing of the peony’s social media surge coincided with the emergence and mainstream adoption of the cottagecore aesthetic — a visual and lifestyle movement that romanticised rural, pastoral, and pre-industrial domestic life, and that found its native habitat on exactly the platforms where the peony photographs best. The aesthetics behind cottagecore gained significant momentum when COVID-19 took hold. With lockdowns pushing people indoors for prolonged periods, the aesthetic offered a way to signal wellbeing through a restyled environment — lighter colours, organic forms, and flowers in stark contrast to the flat greys and whites that had been in vogue up to that point.
The peony was cottagecore’s signature flower. Its scale, its abundance, its associations with English cottage gardens and Jane Austen adaptations, its suggestiveness of a slower, more leisurely domestic world — all of these qualities made it almost overdetermined as the visual emblem of a trend built around exactly those associations. Peony plants are often considered a long-term commitment, with healthy shrubs surviving for decades with minimal care — an ideal quality for the cottagecore aesthetic, which prizes slow, enduring beauty over disposable novelty. When cottagecore fed into its successor trend — bloomcore, or flowercore, an aesthetic centred specifically on flowers and botanical imagery applied across home décor, fashion, and social media content — the peony remained at the aesthetic centre. It was not replaced by a more fashionable bloom. It became, if anything, more firmly established.
The commercial consequences were felt directly by florists and wholesalers. Florabundance, a US-based flower wholesaler that purchases flowers from Latin America, the Netherlands, and certified American growers, observed a clear preference for peonies, garden roses, and ranunculus, alongside a rise in personalised arrangements that feature a mix of traditional and specialty flowers. A customer who had spent three years curating a cottagecore Instagram feed did not need to be educated about peonies. She arrived at the florist with a specific vision — often with a saved image on her phone — and the peony was already at the centre of it.
Part four: the luxury signal
The peony’s emergence as a Mother’s Day flower coincides with, and is in part caused by, a significant shift in how consumers think about flowers as gifts.
For most of the twentieth century, the flower gift was largely undifferentiated. Roses were roses; carnations were carnations; the gift was categorised as “flowers,” and its value was measured primarily by quantity — the number of stems, the size of the arrangement. The differentiation that existed was primarily about colour (red for passion, yellow for friendship) rather than species.
This began to change in the 2010s, as a generation of consumers whose aesthetic sensibilities had been formed by Instagram and Pinterest brought increasingly specific preferences to their purchasing decisions. They did not want “flowers.” They wanted peonies — or garden roses, or ranunculus, or anemones — and they knew the difference. The named flower became a luxury signal: evidence that the buyer had taste, had done research, had chosen something specific rather than reaching for the nearest bunch at the petrol station.
Consumers spent an all-time high on flowers and plants for Mother’s Day in 2025, with the average purchase at $71, significantly higher than $60 in 2024. Purchases in the $71–$100 price range increased from 11% in 2024 to 14% in 2025. This willingness to spend more is at least partly explained by the shift toward named, premium varieties — a shift in which the peony has been a primary beneficiary.
The peony’s relative unavailability outside its natural season historically made it a luxury item — a flower you could only have in late spring, and only if you sought it out. As the global supply chain has extended peony availability across more of the calendar (using cold storage, forcing techniques, and producers in the southern hemisphere), the flower has retained its luxury associations even as its availability has increased. This is a neat commercial trick: the peony feels special even when it is not technically scarce, because its associations with specialness were formed during a period when it genuinely was.
Part five: what it feels like to give one
There is a quality to the peony that is difficult to articulate through symbolism or market data but that may be the most important explanation of all for its rise. It is an abundant flower — one that seems to be offering more of itself than it reasonably could. A fully open peony has more petals than seem structurally necessary. Its fragrance is stronger than its size alone would predict. It has a quality of generosity that other flowers, however beautiful, do not quite match.
This quality maps onto what people want to express on Mother’s Day. The holiday is, at its best, an occasion for excess of feeling — for the kind of over-the-top declaration of love that everyday life does not comfortably accommodate. A single rose says I love you. A peony says I love you so much I brought you the most extravagant thing I could find. The proportionality is different, and it is different in exactly the right direction.
Peonies are a favourite for celebrating motherhood due to their lush, full blooms and soft, sumptuous petals, which convey a sense of luxury and beauty. You can send a simple yet striking bunch of pink peonies in a glass vase, or a mixed bloom featuring the spring and early-summer flower.
There is also something about the peony’s temporality — the fact that it has a relatively brief moment of full bloom before it begins to fade — that lends it a particular emotional weight. A gift that will not last forever, that must be enjoyed now, in this week, in these specific days, carries a different kind of meaning than a more durable gift. It asks something of the recipient: be present with this, pay attention while it is here. In a holiday that marks the passing of time — the relationship between parent and child measured out in years of accumulated gratitude — this quality is not a weakness but a resonance.
Part six: the numbers
The scale of the peony’s commercial dominance at Mother’s Day is now reflected in supply chain decisions made months in advance at every level of the industry.
In 2024, consumers in the United States spent $3.2 billion on flowers on Mother’s Day — holding steady from 2023’s figure, which was also the highest ever recorded. Flowers tied for the most popular Mother’s Day gift along with jewellery, with around three-quarters of consumers saying they planned to purchase them. Mother’s Day flowers account for 26% of all holiday transactions at flower shops in the US, making it the third most lucrative holiday of the year for florists, following only Valentine’s Day and Christmas.
At 1-800-Flowers.com, more than 20 million stems are expected to sell on Mother’s Day, with roses accounting for approximately 45% of total flowers sold — still the dominant variety by raw volume. Peonies, though not separately itemised in the company’s public data, appear consistently in its most-searched and most-gifted lists for the holiday.
The peony’s specific weight within the Mother’s Day market is harder to quantify precisely, because the flower industry does not report variety-level sales data publicly in the way that, say, the music industry charts individual singles. What is clear from the data that does exist — from wholesalers, from search analytics, from social media engagement figures, from florist surveys — is that the peony is now the most requested named variety for Mother’s Day bouquets in the United Kingdom and a leading contender in the United States and Australia.
A survey of Mother’s Day consumer preferences found that when it comes to flower type, it’s hard to beat peonies — and that 45% of respondents gravitate towards pink flowers for Mother’s Day, the colour in which peonies are perhaps most characteristically seen.
Part seven: the carnation’s quiet rehabilitation
There is an irony worth noting in the peony’s rise. In the decade in which peonies have become the dominant aspirational flower for Mother’s Day, carnations — the official, historically sanctioned choice — have quietly undergone something of a rehabilitation in the eyes of the floristry world.
Arena Flowers’ creative lead Ginny Henry predicted in 2025 that alongside peonies and snapdragons, the public would also see the beauty in carnations and pinks. “These nostalgic blooms are starting to have a real fashion moment,” she said, “and I can see their delicate petals and pastel colours appealing to a more mainstream audience as an evolution of our love for peonies and pink roses.”
The carnation’s rehabilitation is partly a function of the fashion cycle — trends that have been out of favour long enough eventually become interesting again — and partly a function of the same cottagecore and bloomcore movements that elevated the peony. An aesthetic that prizes the nostalgic, the vintage, and the overlooked is, by its own logic, eventually going to rediscover the carnation. Its association with Anna Jarvis and the founding of Mother’s Day gives it a historical depth that more fashionable flowers cannot match.
But the rehabilitation of the carnation does not displace the peony. It does something more interesting: it reinforces a broader shift in how consumers think about Mother’s Day flowers. Both flowers are now chosen with intention, with knowledge, with a sense of the history and symbolism behind them. The era of reaching for the nearest bunch of available blooms is giving way, at least among the consumers willing to spend the most, to an era of considered selection. The peony led this change. The carnation may be about to follow.
Why it matters that a flower can change
The story of the peony’s rise as the world’s most desired Mother’s Day flower is, at some level, a story about how cultural meaning accumulates and shifts — how a flower that was not chosen by any historical founder, that has no official designation, that is limited by its own biology to a brief annual flowering, nevertheless came to define a holiday’s aesthetic in the space of roughly a decade.
The mechanisms were multiple: the accident of timing that placed its peak bloom at the exact moment of the holiday; the pre-existing symbolic weight it carried from centuries of Chinese cultivation; the photographability that made it the native flower of Instagram; the cottagecore aesthetic that gave it a cultural context; the supply chain innovations that made it increasingly available even as it retained its associations with specialness; and the fundamental quality of abundance and generosity that made it feel, simply, right for the occasion.
Anna Jarvis, who spent her later years campaigning against the commercialisation of the holiday she had founded — she was eventually institutionalised, her care funded in part by the greeting card and flower industries she had spent decades denouncing — would have had complicated feelings about the peony’s rise. The flower she chose was specific, personal, and memorial. The flower that has replaced it in commercial culture is aspirational, aesthetic, and exuberant.
Both are, in their different ways, appropriate responses to the complexity of what we are trying to say when we hand a flower to our mother, or to whoever has occupied that role in our lives. The peony says it loudly, abundantly, with great clouds of scent and more petals than any flower strictly requires. Perhaps that is exactly the point.
Key facts: peonies recorded a 175% increase in global online search volume in the data analysed by Arena Flowers. American consumers spent $3.2 billion on flowers for Mother’s Day in 2024. The carnation remains the official Mother’s Day flower, designated in the mid-1940s. The peony’s natural peak blooming season in temperate climates — late April to early June — coincides precisely with Mother’s Day across most of the countries that observe it.
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