Author: Tina Fottler Sawtelle
              Pinewoods Yankee Farm
             
Tina is a farmer florist growing and designing with field grown cut flowers during the New England growing season and sourcing flowers all year round for designs and events. Her blog Color Your Life with Flowers highlights stories depicting how flowers enrich our lives. Many local farmers, florists, designers, and flower lovers make up a community of writers that share the flower love with you all.

The Earth Laughs in Flowers ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson  Tulips in winter just make us happy! Often, though,  we're mystified by what they do after we get them home and in a vase, leaning and drooping all over the place.  The other day I was designing a large altar piece for a Sunday morning church service. Overnight the carefully placed tulips were in directions of their own willy-nilly. I left them be and smiled. They did what tulips do, frolic in the vase.  This reminded me to share with you tulip lovers a little about fresh cut tulip TLC.

Tulips have a mind of their own and tend to grow and  bend, weave and mingle more than most other types of flowers in the vase. Fresh cut tulips are geotropic, they bend with gravity. They are also phototropic, they continue to grow toward the light even after they are cut. They can grow as much as several inches. The tulip blossoms open wide during the day, and close up at night. All these graceful habits make the tulip an interesting and adorable flower to brighten your winter days. Have some fun.

Choose tulips with blossoms just starting to open. When you bring your tulips home you probably want to let them be stylish and interesting but certainly not droop too low. Be sure to cut at least 1" off the bottom of the stems at an angle to open the flower's water uptake channels.  Remove any leaves that would be below the water line. To help strengthen and support the stems and keep them straight, wrap the tulips tightly in kraft paper leaving the stems free that will be in water.

Place your tulips in a clean tall cylinder vase of about 3-4" of cool water and leave overnight out of light sources. The tight kraft wrap will strengthen and straighten the tulip stems creating the least drooping of your flowers over time. Choose a vase that is straight and tall enough to help support the tulips.

Keep the kraft wrap on overnight. Remove the kraft wrap, gently pull away any droopy outer leaves and arrange the tulips to your liking.

To keep your tulips looking pretty, fresh, and happy the longest recut their stems every 2-3 days. They are big water drinkers so be sure they don't run out of water. Change their vase water regularly to keep bacteria from clogging the stems. You've heard my flower water mantra before at market. "Your flower water should be as clean as the water you would drink from a glass." It makes them last so much longer. Ice cubes in the water can also keep the tulips lasting longer.  Remove any leaves as you cut the stems down. Keep the tulips away from direct sunlight and heat. Rotate the vase of tulips regularly to even out their phototropic habits. With TLC tulips should last about 7 days after opening.

 
Even itty bitties made of the last short stems of tulips are fun in the windowsill, the bathroom, or bedroom.

One last tip: It is fun to combine tulips and daffodils. If you do be sure to soak the daffodils in their own water for 6 hours after cutting their stems. After cutting daffodils they emit a sap that will plug the tulip stems if not soaked first.

Enjoy having tulips on your table and in your home. It's the little things that make life wonderful.

~Tina

Tina Fottler Sawtelle
Pinewoods Yankee Farm
Lee, NH
603.234.7908

Author: Carrie Martin

Carrie Martin owns Rose Rebellion Florist and Event Design. She is passionate about sourcing local grown flowers when she can in her design work. Carrie shares with us her enthusiasm for getting flowers into our lives. Some say flowers just die. Carrie brilliantly points out that maybe flowers do last forever by blazing the way to warm comforting memories.

Sometimes flowers get a bad rap because, well, "they die". But in a busy world full of half-forgotten things cluttering up our closets and garages, perhaps we have too many rather useless things that last forever? Flowers make us smile.

Flowers invite us to sit at the table, reflect, and really enjoy our food, friends, and family. What's more calming than pausing to smell a rose on the night stand, or catching the fragrance of honeysuckle on your evening walk?

What girl doesn't feel more beautiful with a flower in her hair or more feminine with a corsage? What man doesn't appreciate a simple way to express his feelings without words? When flowers are grown by sustainable farms, lovingly cared for, thoughtfully chosen, artfully designed, and responsibly composted, they connect us to the earth, the changing seasons in the cycles of life, and the really special moments and people in our lives. They bless the bees and butterflies. They become a beautiful complement to the joy of "green" living.

We devour fair trade chocolate, get drunk on local brews, savor carefully chosen organic produce, and frequent neighborhood restaurants. We make love, visit fairs, enjoy concerts, play with children, watch fireworks, take bubble baths, and walk our dogs. So perhaps all good things must end, but that certainly doesn't make them any less good. Maybe that's why God invented photographers... After all, I still have the photo of the dandelion crown my Aunt Margie made for me when I was four years old, as I ran around her farm in Vermont with the golden retrievers eating the apples that fell from her trees.

Nor have I forgotten that the very first man to ever bring me Valentine's roses was my daddy in 7th grade. My very favorite photo of my daughter is her sitting in a field of blue bonnets. What would wedding or prom photos be like without flowers? And each time I see a certain flower I am reminded of my mother in law, because her memory lives on in every lily and poinsettia that crosses my path.

Maybe "flowers are forever".

Carrie Martin

Author: Elise Sullivan

    
     Elise Sullivan taught microbiology for 15 years at the University of New Hampshire and has recently transitioned to being a stay at home mom for her three teen-aged kids. Photography is her most recent passion, and is a natural extension of her love of studying biology up-close.
    I have known Elise through our dedicated and dynamic Oyster River community over the years. Her recent photography displays caught my eye immediately as I noticed her passion for photographing flowers from an up-close perspective. The focus of this blog is to share and show from diverse perspectives how flowers enrich our lives, with the hopes that others will climb on board to join us all in experiencing this simple yet oh so gratifying form of fulfillment. Delight in Elise's display and writing.

     Flowers are magical to photograph. As a trained biologist and an amateur photographer, I never grow tired of trying to capture their beauty in a picture. They are easily my favorite subject material. Initially, it’s their bold colors that attract me and draw me in to take a closer look. Sometimes their colors are so vibrant that they frustratingly elude my ability to capture their intense hues in my image.

                                     Click on each photo in this gallery to enlarge and experience stunning detail 

     Other times, in the fading light of evening or when back lit against a bright sun, the light is just right to reveal subtle veins and patterns of rich beauty. Upon closer inspection I am always intrigued by the diversity of flower shape and size.  I especially like to highlight those little subtleties in my photographs, like how a leaf retains dew in the early morning. My love for macro photography forces me to slow down and study the tiny details, which then stimulates my biological curiosities about life cycles in my backyard.

     Throughout the season I love to return repeatedly to the same patch of flowers, which are typically abuzz with activity as their pollinators come and go. I find it meditative to sit and watch certain flowers attract an endless army of different bees, bugs and butterflies that move the tiny pollen from one flower to another.

    
     Other flowers are more selective in which insects they use to aid in their mating. Sometimes I find more than one type of bug facing off atop a flower or a camouflaged insect hiding in the cool of the leaf’s shadows. Over the course of the summer I love to observe the transition from bud to flowers to seeds, and through that I keep track of the shifting of the seasons and the transitions of life.

               Each day I am excited for a new adventure in the garden to see what hidden beauty awaits.

Elise Sullivan
Durham, New Hampshire