Flower Guides

Five holidays and one everything-else account for most of what a florist sells in a year, and no two of them behave alike. One is a single day built around a single flower whose price is set months in advance. One is the busiest week of the year, where the constraint is delivery slots rather than stems. One is a season built on a potted plant. One moves by five weeks and takes the whole spring crop with it. One is not a gift at all, it is a table decoration that has to survive a five hour meal. And one is the hardest thing anybody buys flowers for.

Each guide covers how the occasion came to involve flowers in the first place, which ones are actually used and the reasoning behind them, what moves the price that week, and how far ahead to order.

Three things people find out the hard way. Which flowers are genuinely dangerous to an animal in the house, and which are the myths. Where your money actually goes when you order through a national website, and why the arrangement never looks like the photograph. And what to do when the flowers you already have have wilted, which is more often fixable than it looks.