The florist

1:13 PM EST, December 20, 2007

Julian Calderon is a very busy man. Emerging from a walk-in refrigerator, he's juggling two plastic buckets -- one of deep red roses, another of hydrangeas. He clears a space on a cluttered countertop, and produces a sharp knife, with which he immediately gets to work, trimming back leaves and cutting down stems. With one hand, he retrieves a spherical florist's sponge from the sink, where it's been soaking overnight, and balances it atop a tall silver-plated candlestick. Every once in a while he blows hard into the center of a just-bloomed rose, to make it open up more, he explains later. All the while, he keeps up a fast-moving conversation with a client on his cell phone.

Calderon is the Tavern's in-house florist, a man who has probably constructed more bridal centerpieces than the average person can count. "The challenge is you have so much work at once," he says. "You do in a week what you might do in two or three months someplace else. Sometimes we might have 15 parties in a week. Multiply that by the 50 weeks of the year, and you get a lot of parties." -- Lauren Johnston and Linda Perney