Summer Bouquets in Minsk

Summer bouquets: how open should the flowers be when they arrive

A tight bud and a fully opened head can come from the same crate on the same morning. What separates them is the stage at which the stem was cut and how warm the room has been since. In the warm months that gap decides whether a bouquet peaks on the evening it is given or three days later in an empty flat.

Nobody asks about it at the counter, and it matters more than the colour does.

Reading the stage of a bloom

A rose cut hard, with the outer petals still wrapped tight, will sit in a cool room looking closed for a day or two. In a warm one it opens within hours, which is why summer stock is deliberately cut tighter than winter stock. The same variety therefore behaves like two different flowers depending on the month.

Peonies are the clearest example of all. A bud the size and hardness of a marble may never open at all if it was taken too early, while one already showing colour and giving slightly under the thumb will be fully out by the following morning. Warmth makes both of those outcomes arrive faster.

Hydrangea works differently again, since its heads are open when they are cut and there is no stage left to wait for. What you are judging there is firmness, not openness. A head that feels papery at the edge is already on its way out, whatever the price tag says.

Matching the stage to the moment

For a bouquet handed over at an event, ask for stems already open. Guests see the arrangement for one evening and a closed bud reads as unfinished, however well it will perform later in the week.

For a bouquet a person will live with, ask for the opposite.

Tight stems bought on a warm day give the recipient the whole show from the beginning: the flowers unfold in the vase over several days and the bouquet changes shape while they watch it. There is a small risk attached, because a stem cut too early can stall and dry closed. A shop that knows its stock will tell you which varieties are safe to buy tight and which ones need to be taken already showing colour.

Two questions cover most of it when ordering:

• Is this being given at an event, or taken home to stand for a week.
• Should the flowers be at their best today or on the third day.

Say which of the two matters and the selection changes accordingly.

The rest of what summer gives you

Volume, mainly. This is the point in the year when garden-grown material is plentiful, so the same money buys a noticeably bigger armful than it does when everything has to be flown in.

Scent comes with it, and that cuts both ways. A heavily scented summer bouquet is wonderful in a hallway and difficult in a small bedroom, and it is genuinely unwelcome in a hospital room or beside a dining table. Ask for unscented stems if the bouquet is going anywhere people sit for a long time.

Heat is the standing cost of the season. Stems drink hard, water goes cloudy within a day, and a bouquet left in a warm car for even a short while will show brown petal edges by the evening.

Change the water daily, keep the vase off the windowsill and out of the draught from an air conditioner, and recut the stems on the first evening rather than a day later.

Summer bouquets reward that small amount of attention more than any other seasonal group, because the flowers are cheap in volume and expensive in patience. A recipient in Minsk who does the recut properly on the first night usually gets several extra days out of the same stems.