5 Tips for Choosing the Perfect Ready-Made Bouquet for Any Occasion
Picking a fresh flower is often one of the first ways children will independently give their mother a physical gift. That simple act will often invoke deep emotional responses. As we grow up, somewhere along the line, flowers begin to get more complicated and the spontaneous gifting dwindles. These are some tips to help put the simple joys of flowers back into your gifting repertoire.
I learned that this bouquet became a gift from a customer to a local small business to celebrate their move to a new location.
Using flowers as gifts, offerings or decoration goes back to ancient times. Appreciating their beauty and offering it to others as a physical representation of emotion or a sign of a special moment could even be described as a natural human instinct. Globally, people of all ages and backgrounds, can (usually, lets be real, some people can be utterly oblivious) appreciate the beauty of a flower and have a desire to present it, or appreciate receiving it as a symbol.
Flowers eventually became categorized as representing specific emotions or events; a red rose for example. When the marketing machines kicked in and began telling us when to buy flowers, what flowers to buy for who, and for what event, they began to remove the honesty of flowers, those natural impulses that come so easily to children, and instead replaced them with “shoulds”. Walking past the florists in malls and it’s hard to differentiate between companies. Their arrangements use the same typical imported flowers, arranged using similar schools of thought, and are available as you see them, year round, with typical pre-set styles for each standard occasion. The fleeting features of a natural flower have been replaced by a predictable global market.
As our environments become more urbanized with less opportunities to stumble across a wild bloom and be struck by the inspired act of gifting a posey, we lack the opportunity to practice being with fresh flowers and interacting with them. Ditches are often converted into underground tunnels and walking has been replaced by transit. The remaining flowers are part of intentional landscaping, private property or at a store and not something you can simply pluck and take with you.
My mission is to foster a deeper connection to nature, encouraging my clients to slow down, savor the beauty around them, and embrace the fleeting seasons of life. As a micro flower farmer and florist in North Oshawa, I craft ready-made bouquets using my own locally grown flowers and native blooms, so I know a thing or two about picking a bouquet for an occasion. Here are my tips for choosing the perfect bouquet for your next special moment.
5 Tips for Choosing the Perfect Ready-Made Bouquet for Any Occasion
Choose locally grown flowers.
Locally grown flowers will reflect the current season and environment of the occasion, whether it is a birthday, graduation, housewarming gift or an event such as a shower or small wedding. This removes the opportunity for a flower to feel out of place, too formal or informal; instead it will feel like a natural fit. They will carry with them a sense of place and time.
The added benefits to locally grown flowers are that they have often travelled far fewer kilometers, been handled by far less people and are fresher. All of this means a longer vase life and opportunity to savour the flowers by the end recipient. Most of the flower farms in Southern Ontario selling directly to the public (rather then through wholesale outlets) are smaller operations, compared to typical agriculture, and they are operating in a more organic, sustainable way. This means your flowers are (usually) free from pesticides and other possible sprays that may be required from international import regulations.Trust your gut.
When you have a limited range of flowers to choose from because you are opting for seasonal, fresh blooms, you have already removed a lot of the pretenses associated with flowers. Many of the flowers in a florist shop carry with them meanings in both the colour and form, friendship versus romance and so on. (You may know that the person you have in mind loves yellow, but you don’t want to find yourself indirectly representing the friendzone with your offering or perhaps indirectly promoting romance.) Being able to sample a flower from any part of the world in any colour can lead to overwhelm and inability to follow your intuition.
Many of those pretenses are removed with a fresh flower stand bouquet. Instead you can allow yourself to be inspired by the recipient, their unique traits and the things that you know they will love. Often the first bouquet you are drawn to ends up being ‘the one’ even after considering all the options.Scent lingers
“Smell can instantly trigger an emotional response along with a memory, and our emotional states have a very strong effect on our physical well-being,” says Rachel Herz, a neuroscientist at Brown University who studies the psychological science of smell.
One of the first thing people do when meeting a flower is smell it. Often times it is the scent of a flower that leads to it becoming someone’s favourite. Unfortunately, most of the varieties imported from around the globe, especially those offered in grocery stores, lack this extremely key piece of the flower experience. As plants have been bred for color, form, and other features like long vase life after cutting, the scents have disappeared. There is often much more scent involved in garden and micro-farming cut flower varieties. Follow your nose.Remove any next steps.
Gifts should not include additional work for the recipient. Not everyone sees arranging flowers as work but it can be an overwhelming activity for others. Opting for a pre-made bouquet that is already colour coordinated, balanced and in water allows for a set it and admire it reception. There is no need to dig out a vase or holder when they reach their destination, no need to trim and fluff or fiddle, unless they chose to. It is more likely to look fresh upon arrival having traveled in water.Transportation.
Not all vases are transport friendly and some require extra packaging to keep them from toppling over and spilling in the car. This can lead to a lot of boxes, stuffing and plastics that become single use, and can get in the way depending on the type of occasion the flowers are going to. I trialed a number of vessels when deciding what to offer my fresh cut flowers in. I wanted something that would fit into a cupholder in a vehicle to make transportation a breeze, and that wouldn’t be relegated to the back of a storage cupboard and rarely used again. I settled on the humble mason jar. It fits into the majority of expandable cup holders, is easy to carry with one hand and it’s simple classic shape allows it to blend into most occasions with ease. It can be reused time and again for more then simply a vessel for your gift.
Bonus Tip: If you have a child with you, let them choose. They choose with their heart in the most pure and honest capacity. The bouquets that resonate the best were often picked from the bunches by a younger member of society. They haven’t been programmed by society to know all the things that flowers should or shouldn’t be. They appreciate them for exactly what they are and they have a sense of matching them to a person that is unparalleled.
If you now find yourself on the hunt for locally grown flowers for your own special occasion, and you are in Durham Region, come and visit the fresh cut flower stand. It is located just east of the Oshawa Zoo and is open Fridays to Sundays during the growing season (April to October).
