Bouquet with Sunflowers in Bucharest

Sunflower bouquets: a field crop with a short calendar

The sunflower reaches the counter as a field crop that happens to be sold by the stem. It comes off open ground through the second half of summer, in volume, and those are the weeks when the discs are widest, the stems longest and the petals firm instead of papery. The same flower ordered in midwinter arrives from glasshouses with a head half the size and a stem cut short to match.

Season shows on this flower more plainly than on almost anything else in the shop.

High summer into early autumn

Peak supply is short and generous. Stems come in long, often over a metre, so a florist can cut down to any height without wrecking the proportions of the bunch. Growers are clearing whole fields at once, which is why the price sits at its lowest of the year at exactly the moment the quality sits at its highest.

Everything else in season at that point stands up to a disc the size of a saucer. Dahlias hold their own on weight. Wheat and barley heads bring the field back into the arrangement. Hydrangea in its dusty late phase, branches carrying rose hips or small hard apples, seed pods still green: all of them read at the same scale.

Outside those months the same order turns into a compromise, and the loose gathered look that made the bunch worth having is the first thing to go.

If the date is fixed and lands in December, changing the flower usually beats insisting on the species. Yellow is the point more often than the sunflower is. A bunch built on large-headed chrysanthemums covers the same warm brief at full quality.

What the gesture says

A sunflower bouquet is loud, cheerful and entirely without romance, which narrows the occasions and makes the remaining ones easy. Housewarmings. A colleague coming back after a long absence. A friend who has just finished something difficult. Anyone who would find roses embarrassing to receive in front of other people.

It does not work as a condolence flower and it does not work as an apology.

The scale is part of the message. These are big heads on thick stems, and even a modest bunch of five occupies a table the way twenty roses would, which reads as generous in a kitchen and slightly aggressive in a small office.

Sending them to a workplace is worth a second thought for a practical reason as well. The bunch is heavy, needs a substantial vase, and few offices own one, so the flowers often end up in a mop bucket by lunchtime. Send them home instead, or send fewer stems with a vase included.

Once it is standing in water

The head is the whole engineering problem. It is heavy, it sits at the top of a coarse hollow stem, and it drinks at a rate that surprises people used to roses.

Three habits cover most of it. Top the water up every evening rather than every few days, because a vase that runs dry overnight gives you a bent neck by morning and the neck does not straighten again. Keep the vase away from a bright window, since a cut sunflower still turns towards the light and will show you the backs of its heads within a week. Recut with a knife rather than secateurs, which crush the soft core.

Delivery is the other place where the weight tells. A courier in Bucharest carries these boxed with each head held separately, and a bunch that has been allowed to travel loose arrives with bruised petals along one side. Feel the neck just under the disc when it reaches you: firm is right, soft is already too late.

Buy sunflowers in their season and they are one of the easiest cut flowers to live with. Buy them out of it and you are paying more for less flower.