365 Days of Floral Education - Days 26-30

As part of our 125^thAnniversary celebration at Stein Your Florist Co. we are sharing a year of floral education, November 1, 2012 thru October 31, 2013. Each day we will post something new on our Facebook page to share our knowledge of our favorite things, flowers and plants and we'll be updating our blog every 5 days or so. No need for pencils and notebooks, just sharing some simple lessons in floristry.

Daffodils

Day 26 - Daffodils last longer in shallow water, so when you re-cut their stems and change their water (adding additional floral food) every two or three days, fill the vase only partway. You can leave the protective husks on or gently remove them. When daffodil stems are cut, they release sap that can shorten the life of other flowers. To prevent this, after cutting their stems, place them in a bucket of water for at least 12 hours on their own before mixing them with other flowers. Some modern designs use daffodils with the bulb and roots still intact on the stems. The soil is washed from the root system – and you can enjoy the full botany of the flower from roots to stem, leaves and blossoms.

Sunflowers

Day 27 – Sunflowers are a wonderful cheerful flower that can put a smile on anyone’s face and their seeds are a tasty treat, but did you know their stems also were once used for a rather practical application? Before the advent of modern materials early life jackets used dried sunflower stems for buoyancy. Sunflowers also lent themselves to the Chernobyl nuclear crisis, sopping up dangerous strontium and caesium. Beautiful and useful!








Pine needle tea

Day 28 – Tis the season for pine and we are using tons of it in our shops, but besides looking and smelling great it has some edible qualities too (though we don’t recommend eating our ornamental pine). Some species of pine have large seeds, called pine nuts, that are harvested for cooking and baking. The soft, moist, white inner bark, cambium, found clinging to the woody outer bark is edible and very high in vitamins A and C. It can be eaten raw in slices as a snack or dried and ground up into a powder for use as a thickener in stews, soups, and other foods. This was so common among the Adirondack Indians that they got their name from the Mohawk Indian word atirú:taks, meaning "tree eaters". And a tea made by steeping young, green pine needles in boiling water (known as "tallstrunt" in Sweden) is also high in vitamins A and C.

Flower varieties

Day 29 – On any given day at our flower shops you’ll see more than 100 varieties of flowers, but did you know that there are between 250,000 and 400,000 species of flowers on planet earth, making up 462 different families? Only about 85 percent of these species have been cataloged. There are 1,300 species of begonia alone and approximately 130 species of roses, not including hybrids.

Flower pollination via hummingbird

Day 30 - Fossil evidence suggests that flowering plants have only been around for about 140 million years. This could be because flowering plants are dependent on animals for their reproduction and dispersal. Despite their relative youth, flowering plants, or angiosperms, now dominate the world's plant life. Many fruits and seeds are eaten or otherwise used by people and almost all the plants we use in agriculture are flowering plants.