Cut flowers for winter

In winter, I like to buy cut flowers at the grocery store. I try to find the ones on sale, though you have to look carefully at the blossoms and judge their age. My favorite grocery store flower is alstroemeria, which is the longest lasting cut flower I know. Carnations are my second favorite and some of the colors reward me with the clove-like scent.

This is a bouquet of sale alstroemeria that I bought just after their sell-by date. It is now going on the 3rd week at my house. They came home with 18” stems and I have repeatedly cut their stems and given them fresh water. They are shorter but still lovely.

As soon as you get them home, pull off any leaves that might go under water in the vase, and cut off about 2”-3” of their stems with a sharp tool. I keep clippers in my kitchen drawer, but a sharp knife works, too. Then put them immediately into warmish water at least ½ way up their stems. Leave them there for a couple of hours and then arrange them in a vase.

By cutting the stems, you open up the vascular tubes (think drinking straws) that allow the flower to pull water up the stem. These tubes are TEENY and close up pretty quickly with the debris that grows in the vase water. So cut the stems every couple of days and give the flowers clean water.

This is the fresh cut end of a head of leaf lettuce. The white dots around the outside are the vascular tubes. Note the brown dots on the cut-leaf stem to the left. These are sealed vascular tubes that won't let water through.

Sometimes, cut flowers come with flower food. I will use a bit of that - maybe a teaspoon in a vase. Since it often clouds the water or leaves sediment on the bottom, I don’t use the whole package. The key to longevity though, is to cut the stems and reopen the tubes.

All the chrysanthemum varieties respond well to this treatment, but they will drop petals and wilt faster than the other two kinds of flowers. Other grocery store flowers seem to respond well to the packaged flower food.

I have found that roses are the most difficult to keep from wilting. My theory is that cut roses don’t pull water up the stem as successfully as other flowers. If you cut the stems pretty short, maybe 6”, roses do better. But that goes against the “long stemmed roses” view that folks have. Some recommendations also suggest crushing the woody stem – but that crushes the vascular tubes, so I don’t see that as a usable solution.

Other ideas include cutting upward from the base of the stem, again with a sharp pair of pruners. This, plus cutting the stem at an angle instead of straight across, gives more surface area for water absorption, so I can appreciate the validity of these practices.

There are the theories of adding soda pop, aspirin and who knows what else to the water. I haven’t experimented with any of these. Additives in water could be beneficial for some types of cut flowers.
But for those of us with a bouquet from the grocery store, clean water and fresh cut stems are the most important steps in long-lasting flowers.