Care Guide
Make It Last
A little ritual, a longer bloom
Most cut flowers do not die of age — they die of thirst, bacteria, and a sunny windowsill. The routine below is the same conditioning logic our designers use in the studio, translated for your kitchen counter. Five minutes every couple of days will roughly double the life of your arrangement.
01
The First Ten Minutes
What you do when flowers arrive matters more than anything you do after. Get them into water quickly — a stem out of water starts sealing its cut within the hour. If your arrangement arrived in a vessel, top it up; flowers drink hardest in their first day. If it arrived hand-tied, recut every stem about an inch up, at a sharp angle, and place it in a clean vase of cool water. The angle matters: it widens the drinking surface and keeps the stem from sitting flat against the vase bottom.
02
The Every-Other-Day Ritual
Three small habits, in order of impact.
Change the water
Every two days, fully — not a top-up. Cloudy water is bacteria, and bacteria clog stems from the inside. Rinse the vase while you are at it. This single habit outperforms every packet and home remedy.
Recut the stems
A fresh half-inch cut at an angle each time you change the water reopens the stem's ability to drink. Use sharp scissors or a knife; crushing a stem with dull blades does more harm than not cutting at all.
Edit as you go
Remove any leaf sitting below the waterline — submerged foliage rots fastest. As individual blooms fade, lift them out; a spent flower releases ethylene that ages its neighbors. An edited arrangement often looks better in week two than day one.
03
Where to Put It
Placement is silent care. Keep arrangements out of direct sunlight and away from heat vents — cut flowers are not plants, and sun now only speeds them along. Avoid the fruit bowl: ripening fruit releases ethylene, the same gas that ages blooms. Cooler rooms mean longer life, which is why florists keep coolers; a hallway table beats a sunny kitchen island. And drafts, both hot and cold, dehydrate petals faster than most people expect.
04
Caring for Preserved Pieces
Preserved arrangements ask for almost nothing — which is the point — but the little they ask for matters. No water, ever; preservation replaces the flower's moisture, and adding more will damage it. Keep the piece out of direct sunlight, which slowly lifts color from preserved petals just as it does from fabric. Avoid humid rooms — bathrooms and kitchen sinks are the two places a dome should not live. Leave the dome on: it is the piece's whole climate. If dust gathers on an uncovered preserved piece, a gentle pass with a hairdryer on cool, from a distance, is all it needs. Treated this way, a preserved piece keeps its beauty for a year at minimum and often for several.
05
When Something Seems Off
Roses drooping at the neck early, blooms fading in the first day, water clouding within hours — write to us. Sometimes there is a rescue (a deep recut and warm water revives a bent-neck rose more often than you would think), and sometimes the flowers simply were not right, in which case we want to know and we will make it right.
Send a photo to hello@maydebrands.com — the studio will tell you exactly what it needs.