HOLLYWOOD — Perla Quintero could read the city by its flower orders. A sudden run on white lilies meant a funeral. A standing order of red roses arriving on a Thursday meant an opening the studios hadn’t announced yet. Most weeks she knew what was happening in Hollywood before the trade papers did.
Mrs. Quintero, who ran her family’s flower shop a block off Hollywood Boulevard for fifty years, died June 24 at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. She was 79. Her son said the cause was complications from a stroke.
The shop opened in 1968, started by her parents, immigrants from Jalisco who arrived knowing more about growing flowers than selling them. Perla, then a teenager, worked the counter after school and took over the business in her late twenties, when her father’s hands gave out. She never renamed it. The sign said what it had always said.
The work that kept the lights on was the industry work — the enormous arrangements that dressed premieres, the sprays sent to opening-night parties, the bouquets a studio orders by the dozen when it wants a star to feel loved. Quintero learned the unwritten rules fast: that the flowers had to survive hot lights and photographers, that the card mattered more than the roses, that a delivery ten minutes late was worse than no delivery at all.
“My mother could build an arrangement the size of a doorway in an hour and make it look like it grew there,” said her son, Mateo Quintero, who worked the delivery van for years. “And she’d do the fifteen-dollar get-well bouquet for the lady down the street with exactly the same care. She said a flower doesn’t know whether it’s going to a premiere or a hospital. Only the people do.”
For every marquee event there were quieter deliveries. She did the flowers for weddings of customers whose own weddings she had done, and then, in time, for their funerals. She kept a book of standing orders going back decades, some of them for people long dead, and could recite anniversaries and preferences from memory without opening it.
Perla Quintero was born in 1947 and grew up in the back of the shop before it was hers, doing homework among the buckets. She married Efrén Reyes-Quintero, who kept the books, in 1971; he died in 2016. She is survived by her son, Mateo, of Hollywood; a daughter, Alba Reynoso of Whittier; four grandchildren; and a sister in Guadalajara. The family said the shop will stay open, run by Mateo.
She had strong opinions about carnations, which she defended, and baby’s breath, which she did not, and she thought the fashion for flowers that look like they were “grabbed from a ditch” was mostly a way to charge more for less. She was usually right about such things, and said so.
On the morning after she died, her son opened the shop at the usual hour, because, he said, there were orders in the book and his mother would never have forgiven a dark window. The first delivery of the day was white lilies, for a funeral. He knew, without checking, that she would have known whose.