Baskets with hyacinths: two versions of the same gift
Ask for this arrangement and you can be sent one of two quite different things. The first is a cut-flower basket: the flower spikes are cut from the bulb, seated in soaked florist foam and finished like any other composition. The second is a planted basket, where whole bulbs with their roots go into moss or compost inside the liner and keep growing in front of the recipient.
Both are sold under the same name, and the difference matters more than the colour does.
The cut version
Everything happens on schedule. The spikes are already carrying their colour when they arrive, the arrangement looks finished on the first day, and it can be mixed with anything else in season, which is how most florists build it.
Cut hyacinths behave like tulips rather than like roses. The stalk is thick and full of water, it goes into the foam easily and crushes just as easily if anyone presses on the flower head, and the cut end leaks a slippery sap that clouds water faster than most stems do.
The florist plans one thing in advance that the customer rarely expects. A hyacinth spike carries on lengthening after it is cut, so it is planted lower than it looks right on day one, and by the middle of the week it has risen above its neighbours anyway.
The planted version
Here the bulb is intact, roots and all, so nothing has been separated from its food supply. The basket is watered like a plant, sparingly and at the compost rather than over the flowers, and it stays presentable considerably longer than cut stems in foam.
It also survives the occasion. Once flowering finishes, the leaves are left to die back on their own and the bulb can go into a garden or a window box, where it may flower again in a later season, though never as densely as it did under forced conditions.
That afterlife is the reason planted baskets go to gardeners, to grandparents and to anyone who dislikes throwing flowers away.
The scent decides the room
One spike perfumes a small room on its own, and a basket packed with them fills a flat. In an open living room that is the point of the flower; in a bedroom, a car, a windowless office or a small kitchen it becomes too much by the evening.
A sensible basket carries two or three hyacinths and takes its volume from tulips, muscari, branches and foliage.
Living with either one
Keep the basket cool and away from a radiator. Warmth pushes the bells open from the bottom of the spike upwards in a rush, and the whole scent of the arrangement is spent in a couple of days rather than spread across a week. Spent bells at the base are pinched off with the fingers, which keeps the spike looking tidy while the top is still opening. If the arrangement stands in foam, water goes in slowly at the edge of the block until it stops taking any, and the block is judged by touch rather than by eye.
Baskets with hyacinths belong to late winter and early spring, and they usually reach a recipient in Okurcalar before the weather does.
