Making the cut
There are plenty of reasons why I rarely cut the flowers from my garden: The butterflies need the nectar. I don’t want to lure hummingbirds inside the house. Spiders are also happier outside. My flower arrangements look sad.
Flower arranging is one of the traditionally feminine arts that escaped me, along with prettily spoken French and discipline about thank-you notes. As a result, I mocked it, parroting ultra-minimalist British architect John Pawson, who once sneered that flowers “suck the air” out of a room.
A clever enough secondhand snotty remark, but one that I grew out of once I got my first garden. With every year that passes, my planting becomes more rapturously florid, downright blowsy. It now seems plain to me that flowers inside are perfectly lovely, a strangely poignant luxury. Plus, a good pair of shears allows us to bring flowers indoors when it’s too hot to go out. It was time to tackle flower arranging.
First step: buying the vase. The glass vase from a sale at Restoration Hardware, shaped like a Grecian urn, looked like something out of an Ehret flower painting. So I bought it, a snip at $14.
Still, filling it was traumatic. I cut the best ‘Pat Austin’ roses, the last of the Mexican sage, great armfuls of the dreamily blue salvia, several of only three orange lion’s tails. The resident hummingbird tailed me as I cut, clicking angrily to chase me out of its feeding grounds. A sacrifice, hummer, but worth it, I thought.
Until I dropped the flowers in my new vase. They flopped so badly, it looked as if Ophelia had raged through in the throes of her final break. There was only one choice: Cut more. I went at the fountain grass, wispy pink gaura, yellow and purple buddleias ... It still flopped.
I stopped cutting. I needed help. I phoned the best florist I could think of, the one that is safe to use even when sending flowers to really smart garden designers, Flourish & Garlande Ltd.
I was, it turned out, pretty typical. Flourish & Garlande designer Danusha Kibby has nearly three decades’ experience arranging flowers, including a year in the Netherlands. We’re largely inept because we think of flowers as being only for special occasions, she thinks. The Dutch have the knack, because “it’s more part of the culture there,” she says. “The little ladies, when they ride their bicycles to the market, buy vegetables and fruit and flowers. It’s just part of their grocery list. It’s like a staple.”
She agrees to lead me through the ABCs. We meet at the West L.A. studio of Flourish & Garlande’s parent company, Floral Works. Home section stylist Adamo DiGregorio has supplied a collection of store-bought vases in an array of price ranges, plus some of his own. We decide to work mainly with flowers that would be in a California garden, including some from our gardens. Joined by DiGregorio, we also raid some of Flourish & Garlande’s buckets for a florist, not garden flower, lime green Bupleurum.
I scribble as Kibby stands over the arranging table, knife in hand, and runs through the basics, starting with what vase to use. “The flowers should never be more than twice the height of the vase,” she says, holding a stalk of leonotis up to the side of a white vase before she starts trimming. She decides on a nearly even ratio, with the tallest flowers maybe 1 1/2 times taller.
Holding the stalk up also helps her envision the water line as she trims. “Any foliage that will be under the water line should be removed,” she says, stripping the leaves away with her knife. If it is not removed, submerged foliage will decompose, leading to a buildup of bacteria and evil odors.
For the water level in the vase, the trick is making sure it covers any part of the stem where the bark has been stripped away. “The majority of flowers drink from most of the stem,” she says, “the rose being the most thirsty. Roses,” she stresses, “drink from the entire stem and drink most from the highest cut. If you’re removing thorns, never remove thorns from above the water. If you do, the rose is going to die faster.”
The important exception is for flowers from bulbs, such as tulips and daffodils. These drink only from the bottom of the stem. Handily, Kibby says, they look best with leaves left on, so the water level can be left relatively low, and decomposition smells shouldn’t be a problem.
As far as how to treat the bottom of the stem, making a fresh cut so the flower can drink easily is all you need to do. Smashing and splitting the stem is gratuitous. After a clean cut, the most important thing is clean water. Ideally, it should be changed every day. “Dirty water is deoxygenated and kills plants,” she says. “Clean water is readily absorbed.” Pause. “Let me put it this way,” Kibby adds, “you never hear about flowers dying because the water was too clean.”
As for the folklore about flower food, about pennies in the water, and sugar, even bleach, only one treatment makes a dramatic difference, says Kibby: the addition of commercial flower flood, the kind that comes in little paper packets with bouquets. Flourish & Garlande’s little packets come from Floralife Inc. of Walterboro, S.C. They don’t say what’s in it, so we phoned their offices, where post-harvest physiologist Samantha Suiter says Floralife and products like it have three basic ingredients: sugar to replace what the plant would make during photosynthesis; an acidifier such as citric acid, because plants drink better in a slightly acid environment; and what she calls a “stem unplugger.”
This, it turns out, is a chemical. Which one, Suiter isn’t saying. “It’s proprietary information.” But for those worried about what the company calls “ingestion emergencies,” no worry. Stem unpluggers are nontoxic, Suiter says. It could be that Floralife is worried about competition from the soft-drink industry. If Sprite only had stem unplugger, she adds, it would be a good flower food, what with its acidifiers and sugar.
And so to trouble-shooting for my flopping flowers. My stems were probably too long, says Kibby. Plus, some vases, particularly ones like mine with round bowls, will encourage the flowers to flop. The secret, she says, is to cut a twig of soft wood, wrap it around your hand and slip it in the vase. Release it so it pops open, forming a kind of thicket that will guide and support the stems. She prefers this to pronged “frogs.”
As for what flowers you choose, this depends on what you grow or buy. For blue flowers, she leans toward silvery containers, because the blues and grays achieve a certain pewtery beauty. You don’t need to fuss, she says. Often, all that is needed is making a bouquet in your hand as you trim, then dropping them in a vase. Or for a bunch of flowers of one variety, she’s an advocate of trimming the stems and plunking them in a vase, what’s known in the trade as a “chop and drop.”
The important thing, she concludes, is keep at it. Flowers grow back. So can confidence.
