How to care for your bouquet so it lasts longer

Five rules in a minute

Everything else on this page expands on these five points.

The first 10 minutes after you get it

This is the most important time: while the bouquet was on its way, the stems weren't drinking, and an air lock formed inside them. The sooner you clear it, the longer the bouquet will last.

• Remove the transport packaging — film, netting, rubber bands, the box it travelled in. You don't have to take off the decorative wrapping: the bouquet can go into a vase with it just as it is. But if the paper covers the stems and gets in the way of adding water or trimming, take that off too — the flowers will be better for it.
• Trim 1–2 cm off the stems at an angle with a sharp knife or secateurs. The angled cut stops the stem from sitting flat on the bottom of the vase. Better not to use scissors: they crush the stem, and it drinks less well. Don't smash woody stems (branches, chrysanthemums) with a hammer — that's old advice that only does harm.
• Cut right before you put the flowers in water: a fresh cut gets “sealed” by air within minutes.
• Remove any leaves that would end up below the water. In water they rot within a day, the water turns cloudy, and the stems stop drinking. But don't strip the stem bare: the upper leaves help the flower draw up water.
• Wash the vase with soap or washing-up liquid, even if it looks “clean”. The film on the sides is bacteria, a bouquet's worst enemy.
• Fill it with cool water. How much depends on the flower: roses, hydrangeas and sunflowers need deep water (more than half the vase), while gerberas and tulips need just 3–5 cm. See the flower-by-flower section.
• If the bouquet came with a sachet of flower food, dissolve it exactly as the sachet says, for all the water in the vase. Guessing, or adding “a bit extra to be safe”, works worse than using none at all. Sugar on its own, without flower food, isn't worth adding — it only feeds the bacteria.

Every day

• Change all the water and trim the stems by half a centimetre to a centimetre. For most flowers, once every day or two is enough.
• More often (every 1–2 days without fail): gerbera, tulip, gypsophila, lily, iris, ranunculus, dahlia, stock, statice. Their stems cloud the water quickly.
• Less often (every 3–4 days if the water stays clear): rose, chrysanthemum, peony, hydrangea, alstroemeria, lisianthus, carnation, sunflower, greenery.
• Wash the vase every time you change the water. Simply topping up the old water with fresh is almost the same as not changing it: the bacteria live on the sides.
• Top up the water between changes. A bouquet with large leaves can drink a whole vase in a day, and hydrangeas and sunflowers in half a day.
• Remove anything that has wilted: spent flowers, yellowed leaves, and on lilies the faded lower flowers. A wilting flower gives off a gas that makes its neighbours in the bouquet age faster.
• Cloudy water or a smell — change it straight away, without waiting for the usual day.

What bouquets can't stand

• Warmth and direct sunlight. The warmer the room, the faster a flower uses up its reserves: a difference of just five degrees almost doubles the rate. The place where a bouquet lasts longest is cool and out of the sun.
• Radiators, heaters, air from the air conditioner and draughts. In a stream of air, hydrangeas and eucalyptus dry out within hours.
• Fruit. Apples, bananas, pears and tomatoes give off ethylene gas, and for flowers it's a signal that it's “time to age”. Carnations, lilies, freesias (their unopened buds will simply dry up), ranunculus and alstroemeria suffer most. Don't put the bouquet on the kitchen table next to a fruit bowl.
• Cigarette smoke — it affects flowers the same way fruit does.
• A wilted bouquet nearby — for the same reason.
• A warm room at night. A night somewhere cool is the simplest thing you can do for a bouquet: the entrance hall, a corridor, a glazed balcony (but not in frost), the bathroom. You can see the difference.

Drooping bouquet — how to save it

The cause is almost always the same: the flower isn't drinking. So you need to open up the stem again and give it water.

• A deep trim. Cut 3–5 cm off the stems, wash the vase and stand the bouquet in deep cool water (20–30 cm) for an hour or two, somewhere cool. Often that's enough.
• A rose with a drooping head (the head hangs, but the petals are still fresh) has an air lock in the stem. Trim the stem and stand the rose in warm water for 20–30 minutes — about as warm as you'd wash your hands in, not hot — then put it back in ordinary cool water. This is one-off first aid, not a daily treatment.
• A hydrangea with a drooping head (and, if things are really bad, a gerbera) — give the whole flower a bath: fill a basin with clean cool water and submerge the flower head together with the stem for 30–60 minutes. Then be sure to shake off the water and let it dry — a wet flower goes mouldy in the warmth.
• Wrap it in paper. Wrap the bouquet in paper, snugly but without squeezing, so that the heads stay upright, and stand it in water somewhere cool for an hour. This works especially well for straightening tulips and stems that have stretched.
• What can't be saved: brown, dry petal edges, a blackened leaf, a fully open flower that's dropping its petals, a gerbera stem snapped just below the head. Better to take such a flower out of the bouquet — the rest will last longer.

If your bouquet is in a box, basket or bag

Inside arrangements like these there's floral foam (oasis): a block soaked with water, with the flowers pushed into it. It needs different care from a vase.

• Don't take the flowers out. The stems are already trimmed and sit in their own holes; a flower you pull out won't go back into the same spot and won't drink any more.
• Water the foam every day. Pour a thin stream from above, between the flowers, until the water stops soaking in. The foam should feel wet, not just damp.
• Pour off any extra water by carefully tilting the box: in water left standing at the bottom the foam turns sour and starts to smell.
• Keep it out of the sun and away from radiators. In a box, flowers warm up faster than in a vase, and the foam dries out in a day.
• At night, somewhere cool — just like a vase.
• If the bouquet came with a sachet of flower food, dissolve it in the water you use for watering — the foam doesn't feed the flowers by itself.
• Arrangement wilting too early? You can take the flowers out, trim the stems and put them in a vase of water — part of the bouquet usually perks up again.

In winter and in hot weather

In winter, flowers suffer less from the frost itself than from sudden changes in temperature.

• When you bring a bouquet in from outside, don't unwrap it straight away. Let it rest in its wrapping for 15–20 minutes in a cool part of the flat, and only then unwrap it and put it in water.
• Don't leave the bouquet in the car, the stairwell or on the balcony, even for a few minutes: a frostbitten petal turns glassy and darkens once it warms up, and there's no undoing it.
• Move it from a cool room to a warm one after an hour or an hour and a half, not straight away.
• In winter a radiator is more dangerous than summer heat: a bouquet on a windowsill above a radiator will last half as long.

In hot weather, it all comes down to temperature and water.

• Don't leave the bouquet in a car in the sun: the inside heats up within minutes, and the flowers literally “cook”.
• Keep the bouquet in the shade on the way, and at home trim it straight away and put it in cool water.
• Keep the vase away from the window and the cooker.
• Water goes off faster in the heat, so change it more often than usual and make sure the vase doesn't run dry.
• You can put the bouquet in the fridge for a short while — but not in the fruit and vegetable drawer. An anthurium never goes in the fridge.