How to Keep Your Floral Arrangement Fresh
Monday 7. April 2025
“How long will these flowers last?”
This is a question I’ve been asked a lot over the years.
Typically, I tell folks that a cut flower arrangement lasts about three to five days, but that’s an estimate. At best, it manages expectations and leaves room for pleasant surprises. But it doesn’t account for a lot of factors that impact a flower’s life span. I’ve had customers tell me their arrangement lasted up to two weeks! Others lamented that it barely lasted two days. I wish there was a straightforward answer I could give everyone that would consistently hold up, but there are a lot of variables when working with a natural product like flowers.
If you’ve recently received a fresh flower arrangement or you just brought home a creation of your own from one of my workshops (thank you for attending, by the way!), I have a few practical tips that you can do to get the most out of your flowers.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
Location, Location, Location
Let’s take a moment to imagine a cut flower’s journey. Despite having roots, our human influence has enabled flowers to travel near and far! All the flowers you see in a flower shop or grocery store have arrived from all corners of the globe. Even if you bring home a bouquet of local blooms from a farmer’s market, they’ve traveled quite a distance from the moment of their stem being snipped, to the vase sitting on your kitchen table, office, or bedside. Once they’ve reached your home, where you place them can impact how long-lasting these weary travelers are.
An ideal location for your floral arrangement is a cooler part of your house out of direct sunlight and away from drafty parts of your home. Your arrangement might be the perfect fit for your sunny breakfast room, but if it sits in the sun for long stretches, it likely won’t last as long as if you placed it away from the harsh rays.
The same is true for air circulation. If you place your flowers near an air vent or hallway with a door constantly opening and closing, that can speed up your flower’s decline. This is especially true in the winter when people have the heat on.
Give Them a Drink
I advise customers to give their flower arrangement a fresh drink after a couple of days of receiving it. You can also keep an eye on the water if your vase is clear. If the water level drops or looks cloudy, that’s a great indication that it’s time to rehydrate your flowers. The temperature of your water can also impact your flowers.
A good rule of thumb: cold slows things down while heat speeds things up. Tepid to colder water is ideal if your flowers still look fresh. If some of the leaves and blooms look wilted or tired, warmer to hotter water can allow them a chance to drink faster and therefore perk up sooner.
Fresh Water Means a Fresh Cut
When you give fresh water to your flower arrangement, it’s also wise to give the stems a fresh cut. When a flower is cut and placed in a vase, bacteria begins growing at the snipped stem. This is a normal part of working with a natural product, but over time that bacteria can clog the stems’ xylem vessels or channels for water to reach the rest of the flower. A fresh cut can remove the bacteria and open that channel for flowers to drink freely again. Make sure to snip the stem at an angle, too, to allow a larger surface for water to the reach the flower.
Snip Out the ‘Bad Apples’
Unfortunately, some flowers just don’t last very long. Think of it like picking produce at the grocery store. That apple or avocado might look delicious or feel like it’s the perfect level of firmness when you’re adding it to your cart. Then you get it home and cut into it to find that it’s mealy or brown on the inside. Sometimes flowers are the same: they may look beautiful in the vase but give up the ghost much sooner than their counterparts.
Certain types of flowers also have longer vase lives than others. Flowers like mums or certain varieties of roses tend to last much longer than lilacs or blooming branches (now that it’s spring, cherry blossoms can make beautiful additions to an arrangement but they’re particularly fleeting). If a couple blooms wilt in your otherwise happy-looking arrangement, you can snip them out without undoing the whole design.
Embrace a Flower’s Nature (and Other Final Thoughts)
I understand this concern over a flower’s longevity. Not only do you want to make sure that you’re getting your money’s worth and that you can enjoy a floral design for its optimal amount of time, there is also an element of sadness at seeing something lovely end. I know I feel it when it’s time to clean out the cooler at the end of the week.
We are all working to preserve something, whether it’s taking these steps—the arrangement’s location, water levels, and giving stems a fresh cut—or any part of ourselves that we wish would last a little longer.
At the same time, this concern frustrates me. Some days I am at a loss with customers who seem compelled to pin down a specific timeline for their flowers to fit their schedule. It sounds like they’re asking How do you tame something wild? When the more important question is Why tame them?
Floral artist, Kristen Griffith VanderYact, summed it up succinctly: “flowers are not supposed to last.” While I think flowers have many jobs, he goes on to say, “Their job is to help us stay in the present. They grow, they blossom, they thrive, and then they’re gone.”
So, while I do want you to get value out of the flowers you’re buying with your hard-earned money, I also ask you to let go of this premise that a flower’s value is tied to its vase life. Let go and let a flower’s nature bring you into the present moment.