As many Americans around the country celebrated the unofficial start of the summer with barbecues and sporting events last weekend, Mimi Pacheco of Jet Fresh Flower Distributors was involved in a much more somber — and meaningful —activity. As a volunteer for the Memorial Day Flowers Foundation, an organization co-founded by Ramiro Peñherrera in 2011 to honor the fallen members of the U.S. Armed Forces, Pacheco felt that spending the holiday weekend giving flowers to mourners at South Florida National Cemetery made sense. 

“My brother-in-law is a vet, and a lot of my family have served in the military,” Pacheco says. “I just thought it was a beautiful thing. It completely changed my viewpoint of Memorial Day. It was no longer a hot dog and pool holiday for me.” 

Every Memorial Day weekend, wholesale, grower, florist and logistics professionals come together to support the Memorial Day Flowers Foundation by making monetary or flower donations, or volunteering time to distribute flowers at 32 local, national and military cemeteries around the country. About 210,000 flowers were donated by growers, importers and wholesalers in the U.S. and Colombia and Ecuador, including DV Flora, Elite Flower, Passion Growers, Queen’s Flowers and Asocolflores. Armellini Logistics provided transportation.

Volunteering for the organization is a family affair for Pacheco. When she made her first cemetery visit with the organization in 2017, she brought her two teenage children with her to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.  

“I think sometimes history gets diluted and we forget why things are happening — and Memorial Day used to be a really big flower holiday,” she says. “I’ve never experienced it as a flower holiday, so I wanted to create that for me and my family.” 

And she has helped create that for other families as well. One of Pacheco’s favorite memories of volunteering for Memorial Day Flowers Foundation was when a woman visiting her son’s grave expressed appreciation for the flowers she was given, which helped her feel connected to him. 

“She said, ‘These are the flowers that he gave me. Whenever I see you guys every year, these are the flowers I receive for Mother’s Day, even if they’re a couple weeks behind,’” Pacheco says. “That just gave me chills because she said, ‘My son can’t give me flowers anymore.’” 

Tracy Parke, of Carbone Floral Distributors, first learned about the Memorial Day Flowers Foundation through Jet Fresh’s podcast in 2023, and has since volunteered each year to put flowers on graves at Arlington National Cemetery. She was immediately moved by how members of the industry came together to remember fallen soldiers as they supported one another. 

“As we unloaded the boxes out of the truck, I saw names on those boxes of companies that I’ve been ordering from for years,” says Parke. “It completely blew me away that all of these people came together to send flowers, to donate flowers, to donate money, and to help cover graves at Arlington National Cemetery.” 

This year, she was part of the Memorial Day Flowers group that was invited to ring the Nasdaq opening bell.  

“Long before it was called Memorial Day, it was called Decoration Day, and that’s when Americans decorated the graces of fallen heroes with flowers,” Maggie Sheedy, chair of the Memorial Day Flowers Foundation, said before ringing the bell. “We’re especially grateful to all of the companies who provided not just flowers, but also the logistical support in bringing the floral industry together for a shared cause.” 

Kenya McCullum is a contributing writer for the Society of American Florists.