orange calla lily

While summer is generally a slow time at the flower shop, it is not a slow time for weddings. When my father owned the shop, he hated dealing with weddings, in particular with mothers of the brides. He never wanted to be the one to actually service the wedding, that is to take the flowers there and make sure that the right person gets the right flowers pinned on them or in there hand. He used to send me from time to time. I always thought it was very fun until the day the mother of the bride thought that the roses in the brides bouquet were not peach but pink and she let me have it until I was on the verge of tears. It was the bride herself that came to my rescue and calmed her mother down. I can't tell you how fast I hightailed it out of there! I never serviced another wedding again.

Nowadays, we have a lovely British lady who does most of our wedding flowers. She doesn't actually work at our shop. She has her own little place behind her house, but she does come in to meet with the brides at our place if they want, otherwise we send them over to her. We make sure however that she gets the flowers she needs. It's a great arrangement because she makes the most beautiful bouquets and we get credit for sending our brides to her!

The only wedding flowers that we actually make at the shop are if it is just a small wedding say the bridal bouquet a few boutonnières, and a few corsages. What I love about the today's bridal bouquets are the fabulous colors that brides are going for. Back in the day, the bridal bouquets were usually white and the attendants bouquets had all the color. Now, the brides have taken back the color for themselves, and they are using more than the usual roses to do it. Orange calla lilies are a perfect example of this. They are small, delicate flowers that are also graceful. They have beautiful curves and they always make people stop and take a second look. The big white calla lilies used to be relegated as funeral flowers, but the small colorful callas have given this exquisite flower a new lease on life, a new beginning just like a wedding!

Pink Dahlia

It's always an interesting parade of people that come in to the flower shop. Of course there are the customers who will always provide some excitement due to the occasion they are ordering for or some sadness when they come in to order flowers for a funeral. But there are also those people who come in on a weekly or even daily basis that are not customers. I am talking of course about the wholesale flower sellers. We have a daily stream coming in and sometimes returning more than once a day depending on our needs. We also have the small independent growers and yes there still are one or two out there who also make the rounds. We have one older man, M. who comes into the shop a couple of times a week during the summer months. The flowers that he grows come straight out of his garden, there is no greenhouse. His specialty is the dahlia, and they are breathtaking. You would never guess that these are straight out of a yard flowers.

I think that M. uses his flower busines to supplement his retirement. He is a small older man who looks like he has known some hard work in his life and he is not afraid of it, but he is also quite soft-spoken too. It is always a treat when he comes. He is usually at the flower shop first thing in the morning. He has a small SUV and in the back the flowers are waiting, tied in bundles, and sitting in water buckets. The flowers that M. brings run the gamut in size from smaller than a daisy to as big as a sunflower and the colors are spectacular. His flowers are as long-lasting as any that we get from any of the regular wholesale shops and the sprays are always a little different in an extra-special sort of way! I think it's because the dahlia is not a first choice type of flower for most people, but they make for a beautiful show in any arrangement.

Jade Rose

If you read my red rose rant, you know that red roses are not my favorite flower. That does not mean that I am totally against all roses. I prefer colored roses: lavender, hot pink, even white. There is nothing like showing someone a colored rose when they have come into the shop thinking that red roses are the way to go. I like watching their face light up when they realize the other fabulous possibilities. Such was the case yesterday when I had an elderly gentleman come into the shop to buy flowers for his wife's 90th birthday! When I asked him what his wife's favorite color was he said green, and then he quickly added that he knew that limited the possibilities for flowers. "Not so", I said, and I went to the cooler! Luckily, we had a nice assortment of "green" flowers: green hydrangeas, green-tinted spider mums and little button daisies as well as some jade roses. His face lit up when he saw those light green roses! He talked about how unusual they are and how his wife would absolutely love them! I love it when I am able to have those serendipitous moments at the shop, and quite frankly who knows how many more birthdays that woman will have, so hopefully they will make quite an impression for her.

One of my favorite books is Voltaire's "Candide". At the conclusion of the book Candide meets a man who seems very happy. Candide asks him the secret to leading a happy life. The man tells him that he lives a very simple life and spends his time cultivating his garden. This in turn makes his family happy. I couldn't help but think of the old man buying flowers for his wife. It's a simple thing really, and yet it will make her very happy. Flowers have that power. They don't always have to be the most elaborate thing, and yet they can make a person smile. They can make a lasting memory. So, take the time to cultivate your garden and in the process make someone happy!

Sweet Sunflower

Several years ago, I spent some time in the south of France. They grow a tremendous amount of flowers there for the perfume business as well as the flower trade. There were acres and acres of farms with bushes of sweet-smelling lavender glowing violet in the noonday sun. But, it was the miles and miles of blossoming sunflowers that really caught my attention. Sunflowers have a sort of primeval look to them.Standing over five and six feet tall, these mammoth flowers that follow the sun through the day have such a fragile look to them. I never imagined that there was such a need for these fantastic flowers. The meaning behind the sunflower is loyalty and constancy. The sun motif is so appropriate for summer flower arrangements. They always make an arrangement look larger than life! Not everyone is happy having the sunflower in their arrangement though. They are one of those flowers that some people relegate to the garden. They don't think that they are fancy enough for an arrangement. The nice thing about the the sunflower is that they do come in several sizes which make them appropriate for almost any occasion.

One of my big jobs at the flower shop is waiting on customers. There is nothing that I like better than to help someone pick out an arrangement especially for the young men that come into the shop. I say that because usually they have no idea what they want. They might come in wanting roses because that is all they know, but if I can get them past that, then I know that it is time to open the flower cooler and let them see all of the fabulous choices. It is always such an eye-opening experience for them and usually a good one! I always think that an arrangement with many different flower types is better than an arrangement of just one flower type. And I feel that I have done my job well when I can get a young man excited about flowers!

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!

Blue Delphinium

So, today is Friday, but a florist's work is never done. The shop is open on Saturday, and even on Sunday there is funeral work to be finished, and then delivered. During the summer, you can never tell what working at the flower shop will be like. One day the phone hardly rings at all and the next day can be like a holiday with the phone ringing off the hook and people coming in left and right. The last two days have been busy ones after a week of near silence. We had an order for a small wedding today, just one bridal bouquet and one boutonnière. The bouquet was made up of exquisite white roses and blue delphinium with a smattering of green hydrangea. One of my favorite summer flowers is the blue delphinium or larkspur. It is a tall flower with many blossoms that convey an open heart and light spirit. They are the flower of July births. People who like wildflower arrangements really like these light flowers.

I was thinking all day about what a dirty job it is in the florist business. It is not always just about pretty flower arranging. Sometimes to get to that place, there are flowers to be cleaned, and today was a day for cleaning flowers. I stripped leaves off of five buckets of carnations, and then it was on to the roses. There were seven or eight bunches of roses to be cleaned. Thorns and most of the leaves need to be stripped of using a large tweezer-like device known as the "rose stripper". I left that shop today feeling so sweaty and cruddy with bits of debris on my shirt and arms. As I was leaving I saw the bride pulling up to pick up her pretty bouquet. She had her hair done and her veil on, and all I could think about what was how different her day must have been from mine! I silently wished her luck on her special day, and headed off.

Red Rose

My regular day job is not at the flower shop. I am a school teacher for most of the year, and the flower shop is my summer job. Contrary to what most people believe, I cannot afford to take several months off and do nothing, but I am lucky enough to love my summer job as much as I love teaching. Working at the flower shop is always filled with unexpected surprises. It can be a day filled with sadness when people come in to choose funeral flowers or it can be a day filled with happiness when there is a new birth or an anniversary. Yesterday was a happy day filled with red roses for five or six anniversary arrangements. Red roses everyone knows stand for love. They set the standard for other flowers. People will compare how expensive other flowers are by the red rose when in fact there are other flowers that cost much more: orchids or calla lilies for example.

When Valentine's Day falls on a weekend, I do come to the flower shop to help out. Why is it that men are so willing to pay such high prices to make their women happy. They come into the shop in an almost trance-like state. They don't blink an eye at the cost of a dozen red roses. They will ask for chocolates and stuffed animals, the bigger the better, and will walk out of the shop happy in knowing that for a little while they will have made their partner's life mean more. People tend to wax so eloquently about Valentine's Day, but for the florist it is a day of work and little rest. A couple of years ago, we had a huge blizzard here on Valentine's Day. Snow drifted up to two and three feet in the streets. It didn't matter. The flowers had to go out. The drivers had an extra body in each truck. One person to drive in the storm and one to get out to deliver the flowers. We somehow managed to get every order delivered. It was a Valentine's Day miracle!

Red roses are not my favorite flower. At the flower shop we have red roses everyday. For me, they represent more like the story of the movie, "American Beauty". They look so perfect and beautiful on the outside. Yes, they make a beautiful show, but really, they are perfectly ordinary. They are such a common flower. Give me other colored roses before the red. I will take orange or a vibrant pink, lavender, or even white before I would be happy with the red rose. To me colored roses should set the standard. They are far more rare in the shop than the red. So next time, think about what you are giving. Don't be a lemming and run with the crowd. Dare to step out and ask for something that has a hidden meaning. Something special that has significance to you and your loved one. Let the glory of the other colors shine on your lives!