A few weeks ago the SO needed a pick-me-up. I went to Pike Place Market and got an arrangement and a simple vase. The only place I know of there to get cut flowers (as opposed to dry ones) creates the arrangements instead of having them pre-arranged. Price: About $40.
Friday I stopped by Trader Joe’s and bought her an arrangement from there ‘just because’, pre-arranged of course. It was out of their most expensive bucket. The flowers look nicer than the ones I got at Pike Place (she used the same vase from before), and they are much more fragrant. Un-bloomed lilies have bloomed in the house. Price: $9.99.
Trader Joe’s does have really nice flowers. Our local grocery store has nice one’s two. I love it when Suburban Plankton picks up a bouquet at the grocery. I appreciate it more than a fancy bouquet from a florist shop (thought, those are nice, too). Plus, I like arranging them. And sometimes I can end up with two or three smaller vases to scatter around the house.
I shop a couple local farmer’s markets in Auburn and Renton when they are open. Both always have a number of flower vendors with very nice arrangements for as little as $5. My girlfriend and her mother were graced with fresh bouquets almost weekly till the markets closed for the season.
Those $5 cut flower bouquets from Pike’s Place are friggin GORGEOUS. They don’t even seem like they’re from Planet Earth. I don’t know how long they last, tho…and maybe they’re not $5 this time of year. But those flowers made me so jealous of Seattleites…
Picked up a bouquet of yellow roses for my mom and made sure I recut the stems and added that packet of plant food to cold water for the vase. They’re on Day 3 and still looking fabulous. She has smiled every time she looked at them.
For some time I’ve noticed that the flowers you see in supermarkets don’t have any fragrance. You can walk in the middle of an enormous flower display and smell not a hint of floral fragrance. I know that “hothouse” tomatoes don’t have any flavor. Are these “hothouse flowers” that are devoid of fragrance?
It depends on the flower. A lot of flowers common in mixed bouquets don’t have fragrance (daisies, sunflowers) or very light (mums, carnations.) Many rose varieties only have a very faint smell. Part of it too is that supermarket floral departments (the stores I go to anyway) have the flowers either in refrigerators or in some kind of climate-controlled display so it’s not like they’re in still air where the fragrance would concentrate.
BTW the reason hothouse tomatoes have no flavor is because those tomatoes have been bred to be sturdy enough for shipping and long shelf life, not good flavor. A tomato variety bred for flavor grown in a greenhouse wouldn’t become blah just because of being grown in the greenhouse.
My mother loves plants. One day she was purchasing some flowers to make a bouquet at home, all of them white or pale yellow, all tiny except for the white lilies, and she remarked on how Dad used to buy her “showgirl bouquets, and aren’t these a lot prettier?”
“Sorry, Mom.”
“ about?”
“Looks like I got Dad’s genes on this, too. I like red and blue and orange flowers, the bigger the better. These pointing to the white lilies have a pretty enough shape but don’t attract my eye at all, those pointing to the purple lilies with the bright yellow hearts are gorgeous. I’m making a mental note to buy you the kind of flowers whose colors I find completely boring.”
A couple of times when I’ve bought flowers for her she’s oohed and aahed and thanked me, and then gotten this thoughtful look and said “and these, you don’t like?” “No, Mom, but I know you do.”
It’s the huge massed display that makes them seem so amazing, they’re really about the same as your average grocery store blooms for price and quality. This time of year the vendors on the main walkway sell dried arrangements only, except for one guy with hothouse (and very expensive) tulips and the shop a little ways away that Johnny L.A. went to. The spring tulip rush should begin in earnest in another month or so. I’m looking forward to it.
The other reason hothouse tomoatoes have no flavor is because, in addition to being bred for shipping and shelf life, they never really ripen. They are picked green and gassed into their reddish-pink state, which is in no way the same as ripening.
You bought $40 worth of flowers at Pike Place? From one of the flower vendors? That must have been huge. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any arrangements that were more than $20. I’ll usually get the $5 arrangements and only occasionally the $10s.
I also don’t usually see them selling live flowers until the daffodils and tulips come out in February/March… did they start early this year?
Well, that included an $8 vase. Not huge. I went through the market, and I only saw the dried flowers. The only place I found that sold fresh ones was the one on the corner of 1st and Pike. They sell the flowers individually, rather than in bouquets.
about?”
