White Stock

A symbol of a happy life and contented existence, stock is one of those flowers that people always ask about. The purpose of stock in any flower arrangement is to fill out the arrangement and give it a beautiful smell. It is not a flower that most people would ever ask for by name, although a couple of summers ago, there was a woman who came into the shop every week to buy a few stalks of stock. That's all she wanted, no fern, no filler of any kind, just two stalks of stock. She said she kept a small vase on her table just for that. Stock has a delicate yet heady scent, but I don't think that most people really consider them to be a a gorgeous flower, they always looked a little rumpled, but oh that smell! So many flowers these days have been bred for their looks and along the way have lost a lot of their scent. Red roses are a great example of that. Yes, they do still have some rose scent left, but it has been degraded to a secondary status in favor of look and a longer-lasting flower.

Yesterday, I wrote about cleaning flowers. That is the closest that I ever get to the actual flowers. My job is selling. I answer the phones, and wait on customers. Sure, I get to hand the flowers off to customers, but I never get to actually make any of the arrangements. That is until this week. I had a customer come in to order his wife an arrangement for their anniversary. He said she told him that she likes wildflowers, and that he wanted to play a trick on her. He picked out a beautiful arrangement with sunflowers. I knew I liked him right away because he didn't go for the typical anniversary rose arrangement. Anyway, he said he wanted to bring in a vase filled with some weeds to have us deliver first to his wife and then come back and present her with the real arrangement. He wrote out a card with something to the effect of, "you said you liked wildflowers...!" for the weedy arrangement, and then a "gotcha" card for the real arrangement. So he came back the day before the delivery, but instead of having made the arrangement himself, he brought in a huge bunch in one hand and the vase in the other. Needless to say no self-respecting designer wanted to touch that one so I was allowed to put the joke arrangement together. Now I have spent the last five summers working at the shop, and I have watched our designers put together countless arrangements, so I think that I have a decent idea of how to kind of put together an arrangement. I don't. Not that I had quality flowers to work with, the best flower in the bunch was some Queen Anne's Lace, but still you would think that I could half-ass it. It was pretty bad, and I could hear the designers chuckling as they watched me sweat over this thing. I did give it my best shot, but now I know for sure that I need to leave the arranging to the professionals! The driver delivered the flowers and they had the affect that the guy wanted. He said that when he came back in to give the woman the real arrangement that their were five or six ladies standing around her talking about how horrible and possibly dead my arrangement was! I never heard back from her husband. I hope they have a happy life and contented existence!