04/22/2016
Preparing Flowers for Wildflower Show Arrangements
Help your flowers to look fresh, tidy, and joyful!
By Willa F. Finley
Want to win a prize at the Wildflower Show? Want to win the hearts of your friends and neighbors by taking them a fresh and glowing bouquet of wildflowers?
It’s simple and fun to do by following these few basic guidelines.
First, let’s talk about harvesting the flowers.
• Pick the flowers the day before the show. Pick them in the morning, preferably before 10 am before the summer sun has begun to zap their freshness.
• Walk around the group of plants you want to harvest from, and visually select the nicest looking specimens. Choose flowers that are not fully bloomed, since they won’t last long.
• Get a small bucket (one to two gallons) and fill it a third full with water. Get your garden clippers or a very sharp butcher knife or pocket knife. Take the bucket of water and your clippers right to the flowers you are about to harvest.
• *** This section has stars to tell you that this is the most crucial part in the process:
Clip the stem so that the stem is long enough plus a couple of inches for the arrangement you have in mind. IMMEDIATELY put it in the water! There should be a lag time of no more than 5 seconds between the snip and the baptism of the cut stem end in the water.
Now you’re back home, or on the porch, ready to arrange them.
• Get the flowers out of the sun into a cool place as quickly as possible.
• Add some plain water, or preservative-containing water, to your vases, up to about half the height.
• Select from your bucket the stem you want to start with, strip off the leaves so that there will be no submerged leaves in the arrangement, remove any remaining leaves that are unattractive, and THEN clip the stem to give the height you want, and IMMEDIATELY put it in the vase. You can move it around later, but don’t leave any time between that snip and getting it in the water.
• From this point on, it’s just a matter of select, snip, and insert, over and over, until your vision of the arrangement has been fulfilled.
• When you’ve finished, add water to cover the shortest stem end by one or two inches.
• Cut wildflowers are thirsty drinkers. You’ll need to add some water every day.
Now you’ve got them all ready, and there’s just one more thing to do:
Be sure they are in a cool, dark, and humid place to spend the night.
Here are a few more points and pointers:
• Don’t arrange flowers in the sun. Work in the shade for your sake and theirs.
• Buds, or very young/immature blooms, will often wilt and stay wilted. Use flowers that are still young but a bit more open.
• Some wildflowers do not lend themselves for use in arrangements. This is especially true of the milkweeds and the poppies, including prickly poppy, California poppy, and others. You can try this: cut the stem, hold the stem upside down, burn/char/cauterize the end of the stem to stop the sap from running. It may wilt anyway after all this effort.
• Use native Texas wildflowers. If you’re not sure whether it qualifies, search for it at http://www.wildflower.org/explore.php
• Practice these techniques ahead of time, and use them often for the delight and enjoyment of your friends and family!
Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center focused on protecting and preserving North America's native plants through native plant lists and image galleries, conservation, education, natural landscapes, seed collection - Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) Project, preserving and restoring native communities, sprea…
