Fresh Bloom Express
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Flower care
How to Keep a Bouquet Alive
for Ten Days
The same habits that keep our studio stems alive for a week will double the life of any bouquet in your kitchen. Here's the whole routine.
Most bouquets die early for boring reasons: a dirty vase, old water, a sunny windowsill. None of it is mysterious, and all of it is fixable in about four minutes. Here's the routine we run in the studio's cold room, shrunk down to kitchen size.
The vase is half the battle
Bacteria is what kills cut flowers, it clogs the stems and the flower stops drinking. A vase that looks clean but isn't (that invisible film) will shorten a bunch's life by days. Wash it with hot soapy water, rinse properly, and fill with cool water. Lukewarm water actually opens flowers faster, which sounds nice until you realise it also ages them faster.
Cut the stems, properly
Two centimetres off the bottom, at an angle, with a clean sharp knife or secateurs. Scissors crush the stem's drinking vessels; kitchen scissors are better than nothing but real secateurs are $15 at Bunnings. Re-cut every two days when you change the water, the cut end seals over like a tiny scab.
A bouquet doesn't die of old age. It dies of dirty water and warm windowsills.
Priya, senior florist
Feed them, skip the folklore
The sachet that comes with your bouquet works, it's sugar for food, acidifier for water uptake and a bactericide. Half the internet folklore does something: a drop of bleach genuinely keeps water clean, a teaspoon of sugar feeds them. Coins, aspirin and vodka are mostly theatre. If the sachet's gone, cool water changed daily does more than any potion.
Position is everything
- Away from sun and heaters, heat opens flowers fast and ages them faster.
- Away from the fruit bowl, ripening fruit releases ethylene gas that tells flowers it's time to die. Seriously, this one's real.
- Cool at night, moving the vase somewhere cooler overnight adds a day or two by itself.
The mid-week refresh
Day three or four: pull the bunch out, tip the water, rinse the vase, re-cut the stems, remove anything that's finished (one dead stem fouls water for the rest), and rearrange what's left. Five minutes, and the second week of the bouquet often looks better than the first.
If you'd rather someone else handled the rotation entirely, that's literally what our weekly subscription is for.
Quick takeaways
- Clean vase, cool water, angled cut, the three that matter most
- Keep flowers away from fruit bowls and sunny windows
- Change water and re-cut stems every two days
- Natives, chrysanthemums and orchids are the marathon runners
Flowers that just last longer
Not all stems are equal. If longevity is the goal, build around the marathon runners: chrysanthemums, carnations (yes, really, the maligned carnation outlives almost everything), alstroemeria, orchids, and most Australian natives. The sprinters, tulips, ranunculus, dahlias, are spectacular for five days and gone. A good bouquet mixes both: something for day two, something for day ten.
When to let go
A bouquet isn't failing when the first flowers fade, it's cycling. Pull the dead stems out, drop the survivors into a smaller vase, and keep going. Our record at the studio for "stems still earning their place" is a banksia that outlived four bouquets and is technically still going.
On the topic
Flower care questions
Questions that came up while we were writing this — answered the way we'd answer at the counter.
Yes, it's the one additive with real evidence behind it. It feeds the flowers and keeps bacteria down. If it's finished, plain cool water changed daily beats any home remedy.
Tulips keep growing after they're cut, up to 5cm, and they bend toward light. It's not wilting, it's architecture. Turn the vase daily if it bothers you.
Mostly no, misting encourages botrytis (the grey fuzz) on roses and most soft petals. Hydrangeas and a few others like it; everything else prefers dry petals and wet stems.
Keep reading
More from the journal
Why we keep reaching for Australian natives
Banksias, proteas and waxflower, the stems that outlast everything.
From journal to doorstep
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