Sending Smiles ~

With all the confusion out there about sending a fresh flower floral gift, I'd like to clarify the best way to find a good florist. Let's say your want to send your mother a lovely floral arrangement for her birthday but she recently moved to a state you are not familiar with. You've never been there and you are not familiar with the florists in the area. In addition you don't want Mom to receive flowers that arrive in a box that she has to design herself. Here's 2 simple steps you can follow to find a good florist fast.   Let your favorite local florist help you. They may not be able to personally deliver but chances are they're part of a floral network of real brick & mortar flower shops that will gladly handle the delivery to your mother. It's called using a relay service. Shops relay to each other to handle out of town orders. We get orders into our shop from other florists and we send our customers orders to them. This relay is be...

Tin Pails , originally uploaded by Georgianne at Monday Morning Flowers . One of the things I love so much about flowers is how many ways you can take th exact same blooms but make them look completely different depending on how you arrange them. Spikey, loose and airy and you have a wild flower look. Tight, compact and round and you have a more formal English Garden feel. What fun and add in so many different flowers and colors to choose from - well, it's mind boggling. Sending someone a gift of flowers for a special occasion but don't know their personal flower style? I always suggest to my customers to take clues from their homes or even how they dress. Do they dress in bright colors? A mixed arrangement in many different colors is likely a good choice. Is their home decor more minimal or contemporary? Perhaps send a monofloral (all one flower) display such as all stock, tulips, gerbers or lisianthus that is arranged in a clear glass cube or cylinder vase. Do they wear je...

This morning, as I was driving to the shop after a meeting, I started thinking about the floral seminar that I attended at the beginning of the month. Our speaker had called flowers a "Gift" and he was trying to have all of us (florists) think of our product as a "gift option". I knew what he was getting at and I agreed that sometimes we forget that flowers are one of many gift giving choices. Sometimes in my mind, I have set us apart from other gift retailers but the truth is that our product is one of many options that gift givers can choose from. Now this got me to thinking how do flowers rank as gift? I’ve been in the business so long that sometimes it’s hard to think like a consumer or even a recipient of flowers. In an instant, I was 5 years old again. It was my first dance recital and my mom had given me a sweet little nosegay of carnations and babies breath, tied with a pink bow. If I close my eyes, I can still smell those flowers and I feel instantly h...