By Sam Bowles, General Manager, Allen’s Flowers & Plants

Mother’s Day this year falls on Sunday, May 10, 2026. For us, it’s the single biggest weekend of the year — bigger than Valentine’s Day, bigger than the holidays, bigger than anything else we do. Across our six San Diego retail locations and our Linda Vista design studio, our entire team is focused on one thing that weekend: getting the right flowers, hand-designed and hand-delivered, to moms across San Diego County. Forty-five years of doing this has taught us a few things about what makes a Mother’s Day flower order go right — and what makes one go wrong.

This piece is the practical guide we wish more people had before they placed their order.

Start with the Mother’s Day Collection

For Mother’s Day weekend, what we offer is the curated Mother’s Day Collection — the assortment our designers built specifically for the holiday. It’s deliberately broad and we work hard to give people real choice across price points, sizes, and styles, but it is bounded: we’re sourcing premium fresh stock at scale and we focus our designers on the arrangements they can execute beautifully and consistently across thousands of orders.

If you want a sense of what to expect, the Collection page is the source of truth.

What’s in season — and what tends to anchor the Collection

Spring in Southern California is one of the best floral seasons of the year. By early May the growers in Carlsbad, Encinitas, and Carpinteria are at peak production, and we’re receiving fresh stock from local fields several times a week. The Collection assortment varies year to year based on what’s coming in beautifully, but the premium varieties that tend to anchor Mother’s Day at Allen’s include:

Garden roses and premium roses — bigger-headed, more fragrant, and with the old-fashioned look that reads as luxurious. Roses are the most-requested Mother’s Day flower year after year. Browse our roses.

Hydrangeas — soft, full, garden-grown blooms in blue, pink, white, and green. Classic Mother’s Day energy, especially in mixed designs.

Tulips — spring tulips from California growers are at peak quality through early May. Elegant, less ornate, and a great choice if Mom prefers something simpler. San Diego tulips.

Lisianthus — one of the most underrated premium flowers we carry. Looks like a cross between a rose and a peony, lasts beautifully in arrangements, and adds a romantic, garden-grown feel to mixed designs.

Orchids — cut and potted — cymbidiums and dendrobiums in arrangements; phalaenopsis orchid plants for moms who’d rather have something that lasts months instead of a week. Our orchid collection.

Lilies, carnations, daisies, and seasonal accents — oriental and Asiatic lilies for fragrance and color; premium-grade carnations and daisies that elevate the look of mixed designs and bring real value at gift-friendly price points.

If you want something fully bespoke

For customers who want a fully custom arrangement outside the Collection — designed for a specific space, a specific color story, or a specific event — we hold a limited number of custom design slots for Mother’s Day weekend, starting at $250. These aren’t bookable online; for custom work, please reach out to the shop by phone or email and we’ll talk through the brief and confirm a slot.

When to order

The single biggest reason to order early for Mother’s Day isn’t capacity — it’s selection. The earlier you order, the more of the Collection is available to choose from. As we get into the weekend, popular pieces sell through and the assortment narrows.

A practical timeline:

Order by Wednesday, May 6. Full Collection available. Your choice of delivery day across Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.

By Friday, May 8. Most of the Collection still available; a few of the most popular pieces may be sold through.

Saturday, May 9 / Sunday, May 10. The Collection narrows to what’s still in stock that morning.

However early or late you order, the website is always the best place to place a Mother’s Day order. Order from the Collection.

Where we deliver

Allen’s delivers across most of San Diego County. From our retail locations in Hillcrest, Downtown San Diego, La Mesa, El Cajon, Chula Vista, and Escondido, plus our Linda Vista design studio, we cover La Jolla, Pacific Beach, Mission Hills, North Park, Coronado, Point Loma, Mission Valley, Clairemont, Rancho Bernardo, Rancho Santa Fe, Solana Beach, Del Mar, Encinitas, Carlsbad, Oceanside, Vista, San Marcos, Poway, Scripps Ranch, Bonita, National City, Lakeside, Santee, Spring Valley, Lemon Grove, and most of the rest of the county.

If you’re sending to a senior living community, a hotel, or a workplace, we deliver to all of those — just include the recipient’s unit, room, or department on the order.

If Mom is out of town

If Mom lives outside San Diego County, we can still help. We’ll route the order to a real local florist in her city — not a national shipping operation, and not a stem-by-stem dictation that ties the receiving florist’s hands. We take the order by color palette and price point, and we trust the florist on the other end to design something beautiful with their best fresh stock that day. It’s how we’d want our own work treated, and it almost always produces a better result than micromanaging a florist a thousand miles away. For more on out-of-town orders, see our non-local delivery page.

What to expect from us on Mother’s Day weekend

Every arrangement we send out on Mother’s Day weekend is hand-designed in our Linda Vista studio (or one of our shop kitchens) by a member of our design team, finished in a vase with water, and delivered in a refrigerated van by one of our drivers. No boxes. No self-assembly. No order-gathering middleman. No call center. Allen’s Flowers homepage.

If anything arrives wrong, you can reach our shops, talk to a real person, and we’ll fix it that weekend. That’s the standard we’ve held to since 1980, and Mother’s Day is the day it matters most.

One last note

Forty-five years of Mother’s Days has taught me one more thing: the moms who light up the most aren’t always the ones who got the biggest, most expensive arrangement. They’re the ones who got something that was clearly chosen for them — her favorite color, her favorite flower, a card with a real handwritten note on it. We write the cards in our shops — we’ll write whatever you tell us, exactly the way you tell us.

If you only do one thing this year, take an extra thirty seconds when you place the order to write a real note. The flowers are the gift; the note is the part she’ll keep.

Order early, order local, and have a great Mother’s Day.

— Sam Bowles, General Manager, Allen’s Flowers & Plants. Family-owned in San Diego since 1980. Voted San Diego’s Best Florist thirteen times.