“For around eight months each year you can produce a steady supply of rose flowers for use as cut flowers to decorate your home. This is a great incentive to grow roses in the home garden and the most suitable rose type to use is the classic Hybrid Tea, which produces long-stemmed roses that are, with careful selection, very often highly fragrant.
Rose blooms picked from healthy, well-watered plants should remain fresh in the vase for many days providing you take a bucket of water out to the garden with you so that the blooms are dunked within moments of being picked. The stage at which the bloom is picked for presentation in the vase depends on the variety. Big blowsy Hybrid Teas like ‘Just Joey’ should be harvested when they are well on the way to fully opening as the buds will not open otherwise.
Bracts of the five-petal blooms of ‘Sally Holmes’ or ‘Rosendorf Sparrieshoop’ should be cut when the first flowers on the stem are fully opened and the whole bract will continue to open during the next week or more.
Floribundas and modern shrubs are best picked when three or more flowers are fully opened on the stem so the side buds will slowly open thereafter. This showy home decoration is enhanced when the petals start to fall around the base of the vase.
When you cut a rose stem from the bush, air is immediately sucked into the stem and it’s this trapped air in the leaves and stems of the flowers that causes them to wilt, even after they are placed in water. Conditioning the flowers to enjoy their lasting qualities in a vase can rectify this.
Once you’ve picked the flowers, fill the bucket to the brim and place it in a cool dark place for a few hours to stop evaporation. A household refrigerator temperature is too cold to store a bucket of cut rose blooms so the coolest place in the house is usually the bathroom or laundry.
When you are ready to start arranging the flowers, add a sachet of Chrysal (flower preservative) to each 2 litres (4 pints) of water in the vase. At this point, the leaves should feel firm when you remove the lowest ones from the stems before placing them in the vase. There is no need to rush with arranging because you have conditioned the flowers and their stems will be filled with water rather than air.
If the roses are wilted, as may happen despite immediate dunking in water, you can restore them by using three tablespoons of sugar dissolved in hot water. Hot water contains less air than cold water. When you submerge the rose stem into hot water, it is absorbed all the way up the stem, driving out the air bubbles that caused it to wilt. Sugar also acts as food for the cut flowers.
To avoid needing to change the water every day, I always add 5ml of Sanitiser (Hydrogen Peroxide 6 per cent) to every litre (2 pints) of water in the vase and provided there are no leaves in the water, many of the long-stemmed Hybrid Tea roses will last at least 10 days by changing the water every three or four days. Floribundas or cluster-flowered roses, modern shrub roses, even climbing roses which may only have five petals can all be used as cut flowers and providing you treat them as recommended, they will decorate your home in vases for many days.
Some varieties of roses, especially the David Austin and old-fashioned roses which can have more than 70 petals in each flower, fail to last as a cut flower despite all the conditioning you offer.
Float them in an open pasta bowl or small fishbowl to use as a table centrepiece. Adding a floating candle adds special romance to the bowl.
A smart man brought home a gift of five magnificent rose bushes for his wife, which she planted and carefully tended in their garden. She loved to pick the blooms and always had vases of beautiful, fragrant roses in their home. One day she complained that he never brought her flowers and he responded “But honey, I bought you a rose garden.” This very smart man would be even smarter if he came home with a lovely bunch of florist roses during winter.
Enjoy vases of roses in your home throughout the flowering season and you will be doing your roses a huge favour by constantly cutting long stems so that the rose will be kept neat and tidy while continually producing an abundance of strong, healthy stems to enable you to do it all over again, and again and again.” |
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