incurablenecromantic:

Sometimes people like to write things about florist’s shops.  Here are two things you need to know, the most egregiously wrong things.

1. It makes no fucking sense to sketch out a bouquet before you make it.  Every individual flower is different in a way that cannot really be adjusted the way other building materials can be adjusted, and each individual bouquet is unique.  Just put the fucking flowers together.

2. No one — in months and months of working at the flower shop — has ever cared what the flower/color of the flower means.  No one’s ever asked.  It’s just not something people tend to care about outside of fiction and it’s certainly not something most florists know.  You know what florists know?  What looks good and is thematically appropriate.

Here’s an actual list of the symbology of flowers, as professionals use it:

Yellow – for friends, hospitals
Pink – girls, girlfriends, babies, bridesmaids
Red – love
Purple – queens
White – marriage and death (DO NOT SEND TO HOSPITALS)
Pink and purple – ur mum
Red, orange, and yellow – ur mum if she’s stylish
Red, yellow, blue – dudes and small children
Blue and white – rare, probably a wedding
Red and white – love for fancy bitches

Here are what the flowers actually mean to a florist:

The Fill It Out flowers:

Carnations – fuck u these are meaningless filler-flowers, not even your administrative assistant likes them, show some creativity
Alstroemeria – by and large very similar to carnations but I like them better
Tea roses – cute and lil and come several to a stalk, a classy filler flower
Moluccella laevis – filler flower but CHOICE
Delphinium – not as interesting as moluccella but purple so okay I guess
Blue thistle – FUCK YEAH, some fucking textural variety at last!  you’re getting this for a dude, aren’t you?
Chrysanthemums – barely better than carnations but better is still better
Gladiolus – ooh, risky business, someone understands the use of the Y-axis, very good

Focal points:

Long-stem roses – yeah whatever
Lilies – LBD, looks good with everything, get used as often as possible
Hydrangeas – thirsty fuckers, divas of the flower world and rightly so, treat them right and they make you look good
Gerbera daisies – the rose’s hippie cousin, hotter but no one admits it
Peonies – CHA-CHING, everybody’s absolute favorite but you need guap
Orchids – if this isn’t for a wedding you’re probably trying too hard but they’re expensive so keep ordering them

You know what matters?  THE CUSTOMER’S BUDGET.  THAT’S TELLING.

-$20 – if you’re not under 12, fuck off, get your sugar something else
$30 – good for bouquets but an arrangement will be lame
$40 – getting there, there’s something that can be done with that.  you can get some gerbs or roses with that and not have them look stupidly solo.
$50 to $70 – tolerable
$80 – FINALLY.  It sounds elitist but this really is the basic amount of money you should expect to spend on an arrangement that matters.  That’s your Mother’s Day arrangement.  You’re probably not going to spend $80 on a bouquet.
$90 to $130 – THE GOOD SHIT, you’re likely to get some orchids
$130+  – Weddings and death.  This amount of money gets you a memorial arrangement or a handmade bridal bouquet.  Don’t spend this on a Mother’s Day or a Babe I Love You arrangement, buy whosits a massage or something.

Miscellaneous:

• Everything needs greening and if you don’t think that you’re an idiot. 
• As a new employee, when you start making arrangements, you can’t see the mistakes you’re making because you’re brand new and you’re learning an art form from the ground up.
• With a few exceptions customers don’t have a clear plan in mind.  They want you to develop the bouquet for them.  They want something that will delight their little sweetbread but you’re lucky if they know that person’s favorite color, let alone flower.
• Flower shops don’t typically have every kind of flower in every kind of color.  Customers generally aren’t assed about that.  Most people don’t care about the precise shade of the rose or having daffodils in July, because they’re not boning up on flower language before they buy.  That would imply that they’ve got a clear bouquet in mind and, again, they don’t.
• Being a florist is essentially a lot like what I imagine being a mortician is about.  You’re basically keeping dead things looking good for as long as possible.  You keep the product in the fridge so it doesn’t rot and look horrible by the time the family gets a whack at it, and in the meanwhile you put it in a nice container.

Anyway that’s flowers.

friendlytroll:

this is magnificent and I love hearing about ppl job feilds

cannibalcoalition:

I have… some thoughts on this as a florist in a different region, but I will have to tackle that when I’m not at work.

cannibalcoalition:

Okay, I’m back from work and I can address this. OP has long deleted this post, likely due to the many many responses. It’s also notable that they appear to be from the UK, and that there are regional and cultural differences between shops. 

They are right that I have never encountered a person who sketches out a bouquet before they make it. If you’ve been in floristry long enough, figuring out what piece is going to look like kind of comes as second nature- you develop a sense of color, space, balance, and texture over time and practice. The only time I ever sketch out a piece is if I’m planning something that requires some engineering. (The 4×4 Cleveland Browns helmet mounted on a funeral spray, the open heart we had to mount on a cremation board, the Red Bull can made out of carns on an easel- stuff that you have to figure out before you ruin your Oasis form.) 

In regards to floral meanings, they matter to who they matter to. The majority of people who ask the meanings of flowers are clueless dudes who are worried that their lady friend might take it the wrong way if they send them red roses. These are usually fellas who are new to the relationship and don’t really know their boundaries. Go on- fit that in your AU.

We get people asking the meanings of roses, specifically, about once a month unless its a major floral holiday (mother’s day, valentine’s day, sweetest day) then we get it all day long. It’s usually a last-minute decision, but there are exceptions to every rule.

The people who care and researched floriography generally know that your average florist is going to have limited information, and just go in with a list of flowers their piece must contain. 

In regards to the colors-

Most of that is true in America as well, with some exceptions-

Purple is a common color to send to mothers and other women in your family, or anyone who just loves purple. 

White is more common for funerals, but we also get requests for them for high-end things like for retail spaces and fancy realtors. I’ve never had an issue sending white roses to hospitals, and most folks who are from cultures that read heavily into the symbolism of white flowers (specifically East Asia,) will tell you up front not to include white.

Blues are a rare color for flowers and if you see a blue rose it is dyed. We do not get many weddings with blue roses because our blue is very vibrant and many brides prefer pastels. But that is a regional thing and I think that if you go more towards the South you’d find more brides with vibrant inclinations. 

Blue and white together are also very common colors for funerals, but also for Jewish celebrations because of the colors of the flag of Israel. Was really big last year for Rosh Hashanah, not so much this year. 

I disagree fundamentally with a lot of OP’s opinions on types of flowers, but taste is subjective- which is something that you learn in floristry. I happen to love carnations- they really do come in just about every color. There’s a variety called Stacatto that adds a cool texture to everything. The anti-carn sentiments run rather deep where I am, but I think that for about half the population if you pointed to a carnation they wouldn’t be able to identify it. 

Like I said- taste is subjective. And a talented designer is capable of making a good design out of any flower. 

Prices on the whole will vary from region to region, shop to shop. My shop has some of the lowest prices you’re going to find in the area because our store has developed rapport with wholesalers over the course of an entire century. But most flower shops work through FTD, which has a specific price guide they have to follow. Chances are that your bouquets start around $50, which jumps up to $80 around floral holidays. 

Arrangements in clear vases will need greening to hold the flowers in place. Pieces using Oasis foam do not need greening because the foam will hold them. 

People who are adamant in regards to specific flowers will make a stink about not having certain flowers. I’ve had a funeral director scream at me because we couldn’t get Lily of the Valley, told us to ship them from Holland. It’s not common, but it happens enough at our shop to be worthy of mentioning. 

There is so much, so much,  in the floristry business so there is no definitive guide. There are many things left out in this post because my experience is limited to my one shop in the Midwest. 

I will say this about flower shop AU’s, though: 

Having talked with a number of florists across the US, there is one thing that most flower shop AU’s leave out and that is the drama. This is not a boring job. I know it seems like it from the outside looking in, but there is a lot of drama at most flower shops: between designers, between drivers, customers, wholesalers, growers, climate, mechanics, event organizers, recipients… there are many moving parts to a flower shop and keeping them all working together means a lot of trial and error. There is much potential there for character development that I think could be utilized, I’d like to see people explore that more. 

This has been a bit more than two cents. Thank you for listening. 

Tags:

#flowers #the more you know #I don’t really get the appeal of the product myself but it’s nonetheless interesting to hear about how selling it works #(though I looked at ”because of the colors of the flag of Israel” and went ‘I bet that’s backwards’) #(and I went on Wikipedia and yeah pretty much backwards) #((although admittedly Israel may have done a lot to popularise it))