dirt / By Amy Stewart

Easiest. Arrangements. Ever.

A phony floral masterpiece to make the suckers weep

(Aug. 7, 2008)  For the last month, I have stood guiltily by and watched my flower garden fade. The daisies, feverfew, butterfly bush and catmint have bloomed so aggressively that I couldn’t possibly keep up with them. After hacking his way through the flowers to get to the chicken coop recently, my husband meekly suggested that I could cut a few flowers and bring them into our bookstore. I had assumed that my flowers would be banned from the store on the grounds that they shed pollen on the books, introduce spiders and other charming but unwelcome creatures, and aggravate allergies. But having flowers by the counter has been nice, and the Shasta daisies in particular have proven to be well-behaved and long-lasting.

Really, there is no excuse not to fill the house with flowers in the summer. Most flowering perennials need to be cut in order to keep blooming; if you do this regularly, you’ll avoid the late summer gaps in the border that I’m about to start experiencing as the summer flowers wither and fall-blooming plants have not yet gotten going.

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To make flower arranging really easy, I’m going to share with you the one and only rule you need to know in order to be able to take full advantage of whatever is blooming in your garden. I learned this from florists when I was researching the flower trade; it is a kind of secret weapon that works when time is of the essence. If your attempts at flower arranging have failed before, consider this to be a one-step remedial flower arranging course. Here it is:

Step one. Fill a vase with just one kind of flower.

That’s it. There is no step two.

If you spend much time in a flower shop, you will quickly develop this idea that flower arrangements are complex orchestrations of focals and fillers, complementary colors and textures, and carefully calibrated shapes held together with wire and foam. But even florists love the single flower approach, something they call a “monobotanical” arrangement. It’s simple, clean, and it puts the focus on the flower itself, not on the design.

And while I love a big, complex, interesting flower arrangement that looks like it walked right off the canvas of a Dutch master, there are some downsides to attempting these kinds of bouquets in your own garden. They’re more time-consuming, which means that you might try it once in the spring, but you’re probably not going to do it over and over again, every week, all season long. Besides, some flowers fade faster than others, meaning that you’re going to have to pull out withered stems and clean up dropped petals as the bouquet ages. (If you don’t, those wilted flowers can cause the rest of the bouquet to fade faster because of the release of bacteria into the water and the release of ethylene, a naturally occurring gas that speeds up ripening, into the air.)

So do this instead. Fill an assortment of vases with water and bring them outside. Include a few larger vases that can hold dozens of flowers, but also bring some bud vases, votive candle holders, small bowls, teacups, shot glasses — whatever you’ve got. If you’re feeling particularly industrious, add a few drops of bleach and a splash of lemon-lime soda to the water. This gives the flowers sugar, citric acid and something to kill the bacteria, which more or less replicates what’s in commercial flower food. Then walk around with your pruning shears and do some damage.

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