April 2010 Newsletter

Welcome to our Newsletter!

This month marks our first of many month­ly newslet­ters to come. On these pages, you’ll learn about a flower arrang­ing tip of the month, which will some­times include a com­plete step-by-step arrange­ment suit­able for the sea­son. This month you’ll learn about tulips and if you’re an Aries, your flo­ras­cope! Each month we’ll review a book on flower arrang­ing and cov­er a flo­ral design tool that we find use­ful in our design­ing. We’ll also list our upcom­ing events includ­ing work­shops, class­es and LA Flower Mart tours. So be sure to sub­scribe so you don’t miss any great infor­ma­tion we want to share with you.

Flower of the Month — Tulips

A Turbulent History

Tulips orig­i­nal­ly grew on the wild hill­sides of Turkey and were intro­duced to Europe in the 16th cen­tu­ry where they became immense­ly popular.

The name “tulip” was most like­ly a Latinized form of Ara­bic mean­ing “tur­ban.” It was said that tulips got their name when Turk­ish men wore tulips tucked into their tur­bans, but it’s also said that the tulip looks a lit­tle like a turban.

In Hol­land, tulips became so pop­u­lar that in the 1630s, the price of one bulb was the equiv­a­lent to a small house in the lit­tle town of Delft where the famous painter Ver­meer lived. Due to lots of spec­u­la­tion of the sup­ply of tulips, the bot­tom even­tu­al­ly fell out of the mar­ket in 1637. The gov­ern­ment of Hol­land banned spec­u­la­tion on tulips after many for­tunes were lost and the econ­o­my collapsed.

The most pop­u­lar type of tulip bulb pro­duced an attrac­tive striped flower. A famous ver­sion of this flower was called the ‘Sem­per Augus­tus’ and was white with red stripes. No one knew what caused the “break­ing” of the col­or and since it was rare, it was one of the most expen­sive bulbs. Lat­er, it was dis­cov­ered that this was caused by a virus that was spread by aphids.

The Meaning of Tulips

Dur­ing the Vic­to­ri­an era, the study of “Flo­ri­og­ra­phy” was tak­en seri­ous­ly by many a young lady. This was the study of the mean­ing of flowers.

Tulips have var­i­ous meanings:fame, char­i­ty, the per­fect lover, con­sum­ing love, hap­py years and memory.

To give a red tulip meant to “declare your love.” Pink tulips sig­ni­fy imag­i­na­tion, dreami­ness. Var­ie­gat­ed (or striped)
tulips mean beau­ti­ful eyes. White tulips sig­ni­fy lost love and yel­low tulips sig­ni­fy hope­less love. You can learn
more about the mean­ing of flow­ers from a great book called The Mean­ing of Flow­ers by Gretchen Scoble and Ann Field.

Buying and Caring for Cut Tulips

• Buy the blooms when they are still closed but you can see the col­or on the out­side of the bloom. Make sure the blooms are not
  too far above the tips of the green­ery. The taller the blooms are above the green­ery, the longer it’s been since they were cut from
  the grow­ing fields.
• When you bring the flow­ers home, con­di­tion them. Mix flower food and cool water and fill the vase with enough water to cov­er the first 4 inch­es of the stems.
• Cut the white ends off of the stems and place in a tall vase so the stems are sup­port­ed inside the vase. Alter­nate­ly, you can gently
  wrap the stems in butch­er paper to sup­port and straight­en the stems before putting them in the vase.
• Be sure to cut the stems right before plac­ing them in water. Don’t delay!
• Put in a cool dark place for an hour or two. NOTE: Tulips are attract­ed to light, so they will turn in the direc­tion of the light
  and that is why you want to con­di­tion them in the dark.

Aries Florascope — 21 March — 19 April – Tiger Lily

About Florascopes

For years, astrologers have linked per­son­al­i­ty traits with the night sky. A fun book called
Flo­ras­cope: The Secret Astrol­o­gy of Flowers

 offers a dif­fer­ent take on your every­day horo­scope. This is meant to enter­tain and if you are so intrigued, buy the book! It makes a great gift.

Tiger Lily Traits

If you are a tiger lily (or Aries) you have nat­ur­al lead­er­ship abil­i­ties, don’t get sick often (who has time?)and are very roman­tic. Tiger lilies get along well with mag­no­lias, pas­sion flow­ers, and oth­er tiger lilies.

Famous tiger lilies include War­ren Beat­ty, Leonar­do da Vin­ci, Sarah Jes­si­ca Park­er, Elton John and Joan Crawford.

Buying and Caring for Cut Lilies

• Buy the blooms when they are still closed. Lily petals bruise quite eas­i­ly and it will be eas­i­er to trans­port of the blooms are closed.
• If you are buy­ing for an event where you want all the lilies wide open, buy the closed bloom 3–5 days ahead of time to allow enough time for the blooms to open.
• Always con­di­tion your cut flow­ers when you get home. This will encour­age the blooms to open. Remove any bro­ken leaves from the stems and re-cut the stems before putting them in a solu­tion of water and flo­ral food.
• Lily pollen can stain. Remove the sta­mens with a tis­sue. If you get pollen on cloth­ing or a table­cloth, remove with tape. Just place a piece of tape down and then pull off. Do not use water or try to brush the pollen away.

Floral Design Book Review

Sim­ply Ele­gant Flow­ers With Michael George by Michael George and Bob Shuman.

Writ­ten by a pre­mier fash­ion indus­try florist from New York City, this book offers a num­ber of very classy arrange­ments and gor­geous pho­tographs that guar­an­tee to inspire. This book cer­tain­ly lives up to its name. The flow­ers that are fea­tured in this book are what we would define as “mon­ey flowers.”

Many can be expen­sive such as calla lilies, tulips, lilac, hydrangea, and anemones. But this book offers more than your aver­age flower design book pre­cise­ly because it shows you how to design with design­er flowers.

So we say go for it! You will enjoy learn­ing Michael’s three main tech­niques called the “table­top method,” the “hybrid matrix” and the “hybrid table­top.” This book fea­tures over 200 pages of many full-col­or pho­tos and instruc­tion. We high­ly rec­om­mend get­ting this book for your flo­ral arrang­ing library.

Flower Design Tool — Aluminum Wire

There are a pletho­ra of col­ors of alu­minum wire that can be used to cre­ate your own unique items for your flower busi­ness. Pho­to by Kit Wertz.[/caption]

Flo­ral Wire comes in all col­ors and gauges now and can be used for a vari­ety of pur­pos­es. One way we like to use it is to ball and scrunch up a long length of large gauge wire and place inside a clear glass cube vase so it can be seen. This can be used as under­wa­ter archi­tec­ture to way to hold stems in place. The

Alu­minum Craft Wire

comes in a vari­ety of col­ors includ­ing bright green, gold, sil­ver, pink and blue. Use the same col­or as your flow­ers to mim­ic the look or use a con­trast­ing col­or like a pur­ple wire inside the vase and yel­low flow­ers to cre­ate a com­ple­men­tary col­or design.