Your Spring Flowers Are Failing… Here’s Why (Tulips, Poppies & More)

Hello flower friends! If you've ever tried to design with spring flowers and feel like they're fighting you every step of the way, you're not wrong. Tulips bend, poppies don't open, ranunculus droop, and the last flower I'm going to talk about today can kill your entire arrangement. In today's video I'm going to tell you why each of these flowers act like divas and how you can use them successfully in your designs. I'm Ellen Frost. I'm a florist. I host an online community and I write a free weekly newsletter. Now let's fix these flowers. Tulips are the first problematic flower that we're going to talk about today. They droop. When people buy tulips at the grocery store and sometimes even at the farmer's market, they can get them home and they can be really droopy. So here are some tips on helping your tulip straighten up. The problem is that these tulips aren't hydrated enough. So the first thing you want to do is you want to give them a clean cut when you get home. And then in order to hydrate your tulip straight up and down, because that's the way they like to be hydrated, you want to put your tulips on here straight up and down and then wrap them really tight. I'm going to use a stapler here. Then you want to put it in a vase of water. It will help the water go up the stem, hydrate the bloom, and when you take the sleeve off in a couple of hours, your tulip is going to be straight up and down. Now this is the easiest way to get your tulips to stop flopping over. The other weird thing that tulips do is that they continue to grow in the vase. They're actually phototropic, which means that they reach towards the light once you get them in your vase. Now that is really strange because you can see that they are doing really weird things. They are reaching to the light, they're curving towards a window, their stems are not straight, and they're changing every day. So one thing to think about when you are designing with tulips is that you might want to cut them down a little bit shorter in your design instead of having them higher up in the design. That way if they continue to grow in the vase, they're not going to be so totally wild and sticking out much higher than you want them to be in the design. The next flower that drives me completely crazy in the spring are poppies. I love them. They are gorgeous. They make every design look so beautiful, but they have issues. They don't open. They just look like this and then they die. So the trick to getting poppies to open every single time is to first take a look and see if the bloom is cracked. So this little cover that's on the top of the poppy, you want to make sure that when you receive it from a florist or from a flower shop that it's cracked open and you can see the color in there. That's the proper harvest stage. If it's totally shut and there's no color showing, it is highly unlikely that that flower is ever going to open. So if you want to speed your poppy along and really make sure that it opens, you're going to take the little cover off yourself. You want to crack it open so that you can start to see the color in there. Then you're just going to use your fingers and you're going to peel back this outer part of the poppy. So you're going to peel this off both sides and once you've got that cover completely off, then your poppy has room to open. It should only take a couple hours for that poppy to just open up totally. This one's just been uncovered for about an hour or an hour and a half and you can see that it's really opening quickly. If you want your poppies to open slower, you can just make sure that they're totally cracked and then they'll continue to open inside the vase. Franunculus is everybody's favorite spring flower but they can be so maddening. They do two things that drive me crazy. The first thing is that their heads are often so heavy that they droop. They're not wilted. That's the thing. They're not wilted. They just droop. So one easy thing to do is to wire your ranunculus. I just take a, this is a stem wire. This is an 18 gauge stem wire so it's pretty flexible and what I'm going to do is I'm going to put it right through the center of the bloom. This does not hurt the flower at all. Ranunculus has a hollow stem so it's really easy to put this wire right through. So I'm going to put it right through the center. Don't be afraid to push it through and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to thread it down the stem as far as I want to go or as far as my stem is a little bendy and then once you've got it straight, now look at that, that's straight up and down. You can just clip off this little piece of wire. Can't see the wire at all and now your stem is straight up and down and it also gives you flexibility to manipulate this bloom if you want. So if you wanted to, you know, bend it in a certain angle you can do that because the wire is inside there. If you do want to tip it forward just a little bit so that you can see the bloom a little bit better you can do it but what the wire gives us is the flexibility to have our stem look straight up in an arrangement instead of drooping and facing down. If you buy ranunculus either at the grocery store or from a farmer or at the farmer's market, the proper harvest stage is in this tight bud form so it's colored up but it's really tight. It could take three, four, or five, maybe even more days for it to open up fully and to get to this size. So the trick is oftentimes we're buying flowers that we want to use that day or the next day and this flower is not going to be ready. So what you want to do is you want to purchase your ranunculus a few days ahead of time especially for events and you want to give them a fresh cut, put them in some clean water, and then let them sit out. Don't put them in a refrigerator, don't put them in a cooler, just let them sit out and fluff up a little bit. Once it gets to about the size that you want it to be you can then put it back in your cooler or back in your refrigerator to hold it but you really want to let it just sit out at room temperature and open up so that it really does become this big fluffy beautiful flower that we all love and want to design with. Our last flower today that I'm going to talk about can be a real killer. Daffodils are one of my favorite flowers to use and design in the spring but the problem with daffodils is that they have a sap inside of them. When you cut a daffodil they have a sap that squeezes out and that sap can dirty the water of your design and kill the rest of your flowers. So when I get my daffodils I give them a fresh cut and I stick them in a vase by themselves for some period of time. Now some people say put it do it for 12 hours 24 hours. You might not have all that time. You want to just get them in there and let that sap seep out as long as you can. If you have a half hour 45 minutes an hour that's usually about how long I let them sit and then I can go ahead and use them in my design. We're not going to recut these so when you cut them the first time try to think about the design that you're making and about how long you want them to be. I know this is going to take some practice but every time you cut them when you cut them again the sap continues to seep out. So you want to cut them once let the sap seep out and then use them in your designs. Spring flowers are tricky to work with but it's not you it's them. Once you know my tricks and tips for using spring flowers your designs are going to be easy peasy and look beautiful.