5 Common Flower Care Mistakes

Mistake 2: Lazy Prep and Defoliation

The most important step before you arrange is correctly prepping your flowers for the vase, or “conditioning your flowers” as it’s called in the floristry biz. If you’re being too hasty with this step and not doing it properly, you’re significantly lowering your blooms’ vase life. And that includes two key steps.

1. Snip. It’s important to trim your stems to make sure your blooms can take up water. Give the ends of your stems a clean, sharp cut at an angle - about a centimetre will do - with a pair of secateurs.

Pro Tip: Don’t even think about using your old, blunt kitchen scissors or you’ll end up squashing your stems, making water uptake harder! If you’d like to learn more about how to properly cut flower stems, check out this blog.

2. Defoliation. That refers to removing all leaves that would sit below the waterline. You can really be quite radical and take off most of the foliage - that improves airflow between your stems and avoids bacteria build up. It’s really important to have clean stems going in to avoid bacteria build-up in the water.