Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at how an indoor flower show stays fresh. We’ll also get details on a possible strike by train engineers for New Jersey Transit.
Credit…Lidewij Mulder for The New York Times
When the last customers have been shooed out of the giant Macy’s store at Herald Square — at 9 p.m. most nights, an hour later on Fridays and Saturdays — the hoses come out.
It’s time to spritz what’s above the perfume and cosmetics aisles — carefully, so the counters don’t get drenched. It’s time for touch-ups. It’s time to bring in the stars of tomorrow, if the stars of yesterday have faded.
So it goes after hours at the Macy’s Flower Show, which has turned part of the store into a dreamscape with 50 varieties of plants. That translates into 8,000 plants and 50,000 stems with banana-yellow blooms, delicate pink swirls and purple necklaces.
What shoppers probably don’t realize when they snap selfies by the roses and hydrangeas is that watering tanks for all the planters are hidden away. The nighttime team props up ladders to reach the flowers that have been arranged in swirls around the building’s support columns. The flowers closest to the ceiling need a drink, too.