Flowers insolita Blog

There are two major differences between supermarket roses and florists’ roses: quality and presentation.  These differences in our opinion justify a difference in price between supermarket roses and our roses.

In Part I, we explained the difference in quality.  This time, we will explain the difference in presentation.

(1) “Presentation” of supermarket roses

Supermarket roses are just unprocessed roses bunched in a cellophane sleeve, bundled by a rubber band.  It has a bar-code sticker on it. These “presentation” makes the supermarket roses inappropriate as a floral gift.  If you are buying these roses for yourself, the presentation doesn’t matter, as long as you can clean and arrange flowers.  However, there is a question of how long supermarket roses last, another issue which we will address some other time.

Recently, some supermarket started selling a presentable version of their bunched roses.  The one I saw had a dozen short-stem roses in a decorative paper bag for $16.99, which is more than twice as expensive per stem ($1.42 a stem) as the regular supermarket roses ($0.62).

(2) How do we make a bouquet of a dozen roses?

In this section, we show you, step by step, how we make a wrapped rose bouquet.

Step 1: We take out the flower materials from a cooler.  In addition to long-stem roses, we use a few different kind of greeneries and a filler flower (in this example, we use Leptospermum).

Step 2: We freshly cut each stem of the roses and place it into a water tube filled with water containing flower food.  The fresh-cutting is necessary to ensure the maximum vase life of the roses.

Water tubes prevent the rose stems from sucking the air, which could result in premature wilting.  Wilting occurs when flowers can’t “drink” water; air in the stem blocks the water intake.  If the rose stem is not protected by a water tube, the customer therefore needs to cut the stem before putting it into water.  The stem-cutting shouldn’t be a big deal, but we know from experience that most customers won’t do it.   So we place water tubes.

Step 3: We then assemble the greens, fillers, and roses together.  It is not difficult but you need some experience to do this.

There are several different ways of making a wrapped bouquet; here we show the most standard style.  In this style, the key is to make the bouquet airy, not squashed, so that it looks bigger and more natural.  If the customer requests a posy style (similar to wedding bouquet), we do it differently.

Step 4: Finally, we wrap the bouquet in waxed tissues and cellophane, and tie with a decorative bow.  We then attach a packet or two of flower food.

As we hope you can see, there is a considerable labor involved in making roses presentable as a gift.