Flower Arrangements

By Hilary Sterne

I am not a gardener. I’ve lived in the city for nearly 40 years, and the closest I’ve come to growing a green thumb is helping a friend weed her lovely lawns near Utica, New York and no doubt pulling out lupines by the root in the process.

But I do love flowers—I’ve bought them since first moving to New York City and discovering you could have a clutch of bright tulips for $6 from a bucket at the corner bodega. Like good olive oil and nice sheets, flower arrangements always seemed worth the splurge, even when I was living on a tiny salary, considering the aesthetic ROI.

Learning Through the Years

I worked briefly as the editor in chief of at Martha Stewart Weddings, where knowledge of flowers was a job requirement. It’s there that I learned to love ranunculus and dahlias and to shun Gerbera daisies. My vases of cheery tulips gave way to freesia (which a boss once told me smelled like St. Joseph baby aspirin) and then to other types of blooms, chosen as much for their hardiness as their beauty. (My friend the florist can keep a hydrangea alive for weeks by splitting the stems, but mine tend to last as long as Meg Ryan's last movie did.) And since I’m a cheapskate, price is a factor as well. The most inexpensive bouquets can be found at Trader Joe’s, though it often takes some digging to find something presentable.

Discovering What I Like

Still, I often gravitate towards the Cinderella flowers no one wants: carnations, with their crisp frills, smell divine. Billy buttons have a certain brutalist charm. I have an irrational hatred of sunflowers and birds of paradise, however, and roses are not really my thing. My mother once told me gladioli are funeral flowers and I have since never been able to see them as anything but. Though I once read an article in defense of baby’s breath and was almost convinced I’d been mistaken about it all these years.

In the winter, I like branches ilex berries placed in a sculptural Frank Gehry vase from Tiffany that was a wedding gift. They last for ages. Woody-stemmed lilacs in the spring remind me of my childhood home in Western Pennsylvania and there’s something to be said for a big burst of alstroemeria in the early fall.

Beyond the Bodega

My husband is decidedly not a cheapskate and likes to buy me extravagant bouquets on big occasions, formerly from a lovely little neighborhood florist called VSF that is now shuttered and currently from a mystery source. Wherever they come from, they are inevitably beautiful and remind me that I while I can live without a car or an espresso machine, cut flowers, whether cheap or extravagant, will always be on my table.