Bouquets for Friday May 30th

A few more local flowers are available but I'm still using commercial chrysanthemums, carnations and asters to fill things out. Today's flowers included forced lilies, 'Miss Kim' lilac, clustered bell flowers, Shasta daisies, alliums, iris and columbines. One lucky person got a peony and a couple bouquets also had some dianthus (Sweet William). If you got flowers today they probably looked like one of these. I thought they all turned out quite nice.

Wisteria

In 1991 I went to Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania over Memorial Day weekend to go river rafting. The rafting was fun and there was great hiking through areas surrounding the river filled with rhododendrons and mountain laurel. It rained quite a bit for a couple days so we went to visit Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, which turned out to be the highlight of the entire trip. Near the end of the tour we walked outside through a trellis covered walkway from the house to the guesthouse. A huge white wisteria was trained on the trellis and hundreds of white wisteria blossoms hung through the trellis over our heads. I thought it was one of the most stunning things I had ever seen.

In 2000 I moved to house on a one acre lot in Ypsilanti Township and that trellis was one of the effects I wanted to create at the new house. In 2002 we built the first section of what would eventually be a 5 section pergola in front of the house and planted a white Wisteria floribunda on one corner. The wisteria is 'Snow Showers' and came from Carroll Gardens.

Wisteria are notorious for taking years to begin blooming. There are all kinds of suggestions on the web about what you should try to make it start blooming - root pruning, don't fertilize, threaten to cut it down - but from what I can see you just have to wait. This one poked along for the 7 years until it finally produced 4 blossoms this year (you can see a couple of them in the picture). Based on my experience with the wisteria I planted at my last house, now that it has started, it should begin blooming more profusely each year.

Conditioning Lilacs

I had read that to get lilacs to hold after cutting the stems should be scraped and split and the placed in hot water. I tried this treatment for the past couple years and found that the lilacs were usually wilting within a day.

This year I returned to where I had read this advice in the first place - Carolyne Roehm's A Passion for Flowers. It turned out I had not read the fine print carefully enough. Miss Roehm specifies the water should be between 120 and 150 degrees Fahrenheit, and I had used hot water from the tap which turned out to be only 110 degrees. I decided to split the difference and place the lilac stems in water that was heated to 135F. I left them there a few hours until the water had cooled. Be warned that this water is hot enough to brown any actual lilac flowers that get in the water, so make sure only the stems are placed in the hot water.

The additional 25 degrees appears to make a difference because the lilacs seem to be holding better this year, ususally 4-5 days. For my customers this is unfortunately only 3-4 days because the flowers are conditioned a day before they are delivered, but the results are encouraging.

Bouquets for Monday May 26th

Still using commercial chrysanthemums, stocks and carnations to fill out the bouquets. The local flowers include forced lilies, columbines, alliums, iris, shasta daisies, trollius and clustered bellflower. Most of today's bouquets looked something like the ones below. I thought they came out pretty nice.

Bouquets for Friday May 23rd

Still using lots of commercial flowers and probably will next week, too. Most of tomorrow's flowers look like the ones below. The local flowers include all the iris and lilies (most of which are not open in these pictures), as well as bleeding hearts, alliums and eunomyous foliage.

Bouquets for Monday May 19th

This is the time of year I keep complaining about when I always need to buy commercial flowers to make the bouquets look nice. Monday's bouquets looked something like these. I grew the lilies, iris and solomon's seal and the carnations, asters and chrysanthemums are commercial flowers. I think these bouquets looked quite a bit nicer in real life and will look better by Tuesday or Wednesday as more of the lilies and iris open.

Syringa (Lilac)

Like most garden geeks, I get seasonal obcessions with different plants. Usually this is when the plants are blooming. For example, this year I already had a little daffodil obcession where I was pawing through all my catalogs looking at ALL the different daffodils I could and should be growing. I don't usually go nuts for tulips so the next one to set in this year was lilacs.

I planted several lilacs a few years ago but they are still too small to yield flowers for cutting, so I rely on friends to let me cut their lilacs for Good Scents bouquets. This year I have had good success getting lilacs to hold after cutting. In the past they often pooped out in one or two days and this year they have looked pretty decent for 4-5 days. My own lilacs are about a year or two from reaching the size where I can cut from them freely so naturally I began thinking it was time to get even more.

I wanted to add more colors and hopefully some later blooming varieties but a quick tour of area nurseries revealed very few available kinds. Apparently everyone now wants 'Miss Kim', a dwarf Korean lilac. I have 'Miss Kim' and it is nice, but I was looking for older varieties bred to have huge flower trusses, double flowers, and so on. I decided to visit Gee Farms and came home with the following varieties: 'Pocahontas', 'Beauty of Moscow', 'Sensation', 'Miss Canada' and 'Marie Frances'. 'Miss Canada' is a Preston hybrid lilac which blooms a couple weeks later than the others and is still in bud. Gee's had several others I also wanted - 'President Lincoln', 'Charles Joly', 'Yankee Doodle' - but I have to draw the line somewhere.

'Beauty of Moscow', 'Marie Frances'' and 'Sensation' are pictured below.

Now that I have my new lilacs, the obcession has passed. I've now moved on to peonies and am trying to figure out where I can plant another 20 this fall.