Anniversary Flowers

My husband and I recently celebrated our 52nd wedding anniversary. Yay!! Well, it was a quiet day and no big celebration, no big gifts. It was pretty much another day, but there’s nothing wrong with that)) I did receive these gorgeous anniversary flowers though!

vase of anniversary flowers from my husband

Guys….you can NEVER go wrong with flowers. Not that I suspect many guys are reading my blog, but you never know. It’s easy for me to say that you can never go wrong with flowers, but it wasn’t that easy several (many actually) years ago.

The Early Years of Marriage

Like I say, we’ve been married many years, but those early years, as much fun as they may have been, were not always easy either.

We both worked, had very little extra money, but we made it. In the early 1970s my husband worked in a factory and I worked in a doctor’s office. I experienced a minor illness that put me in the hospital overnight. Back then, you would stay in the hospital for something that by today’s standard, would not even be considered for hospitalization. That lets you know how minor it was.

Well, the wonderful ladies at the factory where he worked, most had been married for years….impressed upon him that he should get me flowers because I had been in the hospital. Now, he knew we didn’t have money for that, but rather than take the chance of doing the wrong thing and possibly screwing up things in our marriage, he picked up long-stemmed red roses and brought them to me after work.

Well, I’m embarrassed to tell you how terrible I acted. The flowers were beautiful, but all I could think of was that it was grocery money for a week!

Needless to say, I didn’t get flowers for many, many years after that.

Anniversary Flowers

We’ve come a long way from those early years and now I’m happy to say….I LOVE flowers anytime he wants to give them to me. He’s caught on to this and hardly an event passes by now that I don’t get a beautiful fresh floral arrangement.

By the way, it doesn’t hurt that your daughter runs a floral business as a sidearm to Trendy Tree. I don’t care where he gets them, as long as they keep coming!

Making Fresh Flowers Last

I’m not sure there is a magic bullet to make your fresh flowers last longer, but here are a few things that I have learned.

  • Add water.
  • Putting a penny in the water is a myth.
  • Change the water if it becomes cloudy or discolored.
  • You can use commercial flower food but I haven’t tried this as yet. “They” say, it makes your flower last 24% longer, so it’s really worth a try.
  • Remove any foliage that is beneath the water surface.
  • Remove wilted stems that are not coming back to life after a few days. Sometimes it may be lack of water, but sometimes the blooms are just spent. Get rid of them.
  • Downsize your vase as you reduce the number of viable stems. Rinse those stems off in cool water and cut a bit off the ends of the stems. Never crush.
  • Rearrange the remaining blooms to enjoying them as long as you can! Keep downsizing as necessary. I like to hang on to the very last bloom as long as I can))
Remove spent blooms and transfer to a smaller vase with fresh water

The last remaining blooms wind up going on my desk usually. Flowers make for a happy office space))

Keep remove dead blooms and move to a clean smaller vase

What’s your favorite type of arrangement and how do you make them last? I’m always looking for more tried and true tips! Just leave me a comment!

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