The Art of Flower Arrangement Series: Flower Selection

The first principle of flower arrangement is to select a fresh flower with innate beauty and arrange it to create a more beautiful impression. The freshness of the flower is an important variable in this art. I said ur is an important variable because it will also affect the life of your arrangement, up to when it will lasts. How to choose fresh flowers then? Here are some tips I am going to share to you in knowing which is fresh and which is not when buying flowers.

When buying flowers specially when you buy it in big flower markets which you can found huge varieties of flowers, we tend to get overwhelmed with what are we going to buy. Most often than not we wanted to buy to those of cheaper prices specially if we need a lot. With the vast quantity that we can see we sometimes get confused in determining the fresh from old once. One of the simplest way to see if the flower is fresh or not is through petal test. Fresh flowers has strong petals so that when you try to push it a little it will resist and puff then stand back while old flowers do not resist or has very weak resistance and usually it won't puff back. Then another test is the base test. Fresh flower has green base while old ones has brown. Another way of determining the freshness of a flower is the leaves. Fresh flowers has green leaves  without any yellowish spot. The leaves should be firm and easy to pick. Then next is check the stem. Fresh flower's stem has green outer covering and white and juicy looking in the inside. You should not also find any blue powder on  the stem and the leaves of the flowers if it is fresh since this blue powdery are results of the chemicals that are put in the water to revive the flower in which case it connotes that the flower is not fresh.

These are just some of the tips in choosing fresh flowers but there could be more base on your experiences. The next articles will be on how to prolong the life of your flowers. Keep in touch.