Bouquet with Matthiola in Yerevan

Stock bouquets: bought for the smell

Stock, or matthiola, is chosen by nose more often than by eye. The scent is dense and sweet with a honeyed edge, it strengthens through the evening, and two or three stems are enough to change how a whole room smells.

The flower itself is modest. Small blooms sit tightly along the upper third of a straight stalk, the leaf is grey-green and fleshy, and in a mixed bunch the spikes read as vertical filler between round heads.

When scent is the point

Some gifts are meant to be noticed once and admired from across a table. This is the other kind: the recipient walks back into the room an hour later and the flowers announce themselves again.

That makes stock bouquets a sensible choice for a home rather than an office. Hallways and sitting rooms carry the scent well, since the volume of air keeps the concentration reasonable.

Small closed rooms do the opposite. In a bedroom the sweetness builds up overnight and becomes heavy by morning, and anyone who reacts to strong perfume will react to this too. Beside food it competes with the meal, so the dining table is the wrong surface. Ask before sending a scented bunch to a shared office, where nobody gets a vote on what the desk next to them smells of.

What it goes with

Peonies, garden roses and carnations all take stock happily, because the spikes supply height where everything else is round. The grey cast of the foliage softens strong colours next to it, and white varieties look warmer in company than they do alone.

Single-variety bunches of stock are rare, and the reason is practical rather than aesthetic.

The soft stem

The stalk is thick but soft and full of sap, closer to a herb than to wood. It bends under the weight of a heavy spike and does not straighten again, which is why a florist sets these stems inside the bunch rather than along the edge where nothing supports them.

The same softness spoils water fast. Submerged tissue goes pulpy, the cut frays, and a vase that holds a few stems of stock will cloud and smell within a day if it is left alone. Ten stems of it in one vase cloud the water faster still.

Keeping it fresh

Change the water daily, not every other day, and wash the vase each time. Fill it shallow, a hand's depth, so that less of the soft stalk sits underwater.

Strip the lower leaves generously, since they are thicker than rose leaves and rot sooner. Re-cut the stems with a sharp knife every couple of days, because an old cut seals itself with swollen pulp and stops drawing water.

Given that routine a stock bouquet holds for about a week, flowering from the bottom of the spike upwards, with the lowest blooms dropping before the top ones open. Warn the recipient in Yerevan about the daily water change when you send it, in one sentence on the card or at the door, and the flowers will do the rest themselves.