Spring Flower Tips
Spring Flowers are united by their soft, fleshy stems. Here’s how to tell the difference, and look after them best. Tops and tails of each variety shown below. All flower stems should be cut with clean, sharp tools.
NARCISSUS
Sweet scented Narcissus, and their larger cousins, Wordsworth’s Daffodils, have slightly ridged fleshy stems, full of a sticky toxic sap. This flows freely when stems are recut and can disadvantage any flowers they share a vase with. To minimise the effect, stand in fresh water for at least 30mins (or up to 24 hours) when you recut the stems, before replacing in a vase of fresh water. Then clean tools well before cutting other material. Flower food isn’t recommended as it also encourages sap to flow. For a quick tip, if your mixed bouquet arrives out of water, cut other stems, but not the Narcissus, before placing in water.
HYACINTHS
We are spoilt in the Spring, and Hyacinths are also strongly fragranced. Each head is made of many individual florets which produce a heavy head when fully open. For this reason it pays to support them in the vase with twiggy structures or foliage.
Grown from bulbs, they are cut retaining as much of this as possible, and will be happiest the more you can leave on. As this isn’t the most attractive, they may look best displayed in an opaque rather than glass vase. I usually arrange them higher up in a hand tied bouquet than other flowers, both because they don’t like to be cut, but also because they prefer shallow water.
TULIPS
Tulips… everyone’s favourite Spring flower! They are available commercially from Christmas onwards, but are unlikely to appear in gardens until late March at the earliest, from when we can appreciate the varieties through to the end of May.
Tulips have smooth round stems and are cut when the flower bud is showing colour, but still shorter than the leaves. The fascinating thing about Tulips is that they keep growing in the vase - so if you wonder why they appear to be flopping over the side and escaping, it’s because they really are! The bold blooms will often open and close in a daily cycle, and to keep your bouquet looking as it was when it arrived, you’ll need to pull the stems down a little and trim a centimeter or two from the bottom every other day.
After the damp and dark of winter, early Spring flowers, in creamy pastels and bold splashes of nearly every hue, bring the most cheer of any in the year. Enjoy.