It may be more heartbreaking than hearing your Thanksgiving dinner is wasteful or your Halloween chocolate is problematic. But yes: Those Valentine’s roses do have an environmental cost.

The majority of cut flowers this time of year are flown in from Colombia and Ecuador on refrigerated airplanes, burning through fossil fuels. Commercial flower farming has also been linked to other environmental problems, such as toxic pesticides and extensive water use. To be truly climate-conscious, you might consider skipping the luxury of winter flower bouquets.

However, there’s some nuance to this decision. You can probably still put together a more climate-friendly bouquet at the most humble flower stand if you know what to look for.

Roses are red, tulips might be greener

“The carbon issue is definitely one that people are asking about,” said Debra Prinzing, the author of the book “Slow Flowers” and founder of an online directory for buying flowers locally. “But not everybody, including myself, is equipped to do that calculation.”

Researchers have assessed the total carbon costs for some flower crops, but each stem in a bouquet could come from a different country and be grown in a different way, making the math tricky.

One way to simplify things is by buying a classic bunch of tulips. This is the only flower mass-grown in the United States in the winter on such a scale that you can find them at most local shops. And the majority of tulips sold to Americans are shipped by truck for relatively short distances.