Anatomy of a bouquet

I’m talking about a market bouquet—the kind you get at farmers’ markets or the grocery store, or the street markets in Europe. Not a wedding bouquet. Let’s say it’s mid-July. The peonies are long finished; they won’t be making a showing here. But any time of year, a bouquet has to include certain pieces and parts.

It will have to have focal flowers. In July, zinnias and sunflowers are the stars. They love the heat. How about some cool, white Benary’s Giant zinnias, wedding-worthy and showy in a bouquet for the table? We can set them off with sunflowers, and not just the standard yellow ones with brown centers, but some really special black-red ‘ProCut Red’ and soft-colored ‘ProCut Plum’. Here in northeastern Kansas, I direct-sow seeds for both zinnias and sunflowers, starting in early May. I keep the little plants watered, and they grow into strong, self-sufficient plants that do great with just a good rain every 10 days.

Of course, I had to prepare those beds for planting by April (doing this the previous fall is best). I had to get any new beds tilled, and I had to see that they were set up as raised rows so they’d be easy to work with and would drain well. I and some helpers formed them with garden rakes (at the cutting garden in North Lawrence), or Bob set them up (at the farm) using the tractor and the bed shaper. Then I gave them a good layer of compost, and I laid landscape fabric along the length of the row and tacked it down along both edges with 6-inch garden staples.

But before I could lay the landscape fabric, Bob had to precut the holes for planting. He does this using a table he invented, with a manifold that burns up to three holes at once. A lot of growers spread out a 300-foot-long roll of landscape fabric and cut the holes one by one in the field using a torch you can buy commercially. The table Bob dreamed up and built makes it so the fabric can move from one roll to another as it’s cut, and never touch the ground. And he can sit at the table while he’s working it.

That all has to happen before I plant those zinnias and sunflowers, my focal flowers today.

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Once the zinnias get growing and reach 10 to 12 inches tall, they have to be pinched (you snip off the tops). This encourages them to branch and make more blooms. And once they’re blooming, I must cut all the flowers at the right stage, or if I don’t, I’ll have to deadhead, cut off the spent blooms, so the plants won’t go to seed and consider their work done, and stop blooming. If I keep up, the plants will keep on producing right up until the temperatures drop below 40°F at night in the fall.

The ‘ProCut’ sunflowers produce just one bloom per plant, but it only takes 60 days from seed to bloom—a super-short crop—so there is the potential to grow several crops each season (I don’t). The closer I plant the seeds, the smaller the flowers will be. I don’t want them too big. The tricky thing about sunflowers is that the sunflower stem weevils (these are real bugs) can sneak in and slice the neck of a perfect flower just before it’s ready to cut. They lay their eggs in that little slice. The flower I’ve wait two months for is ruined. To get ahead of this, I need to spray them with an organic pesticide, Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis).

Those are the focal flowers (there are a few heads of ‘Limelight’ hydrangea out there, too; I can add them).

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What else goes into this bouquet? It wants a couple of kinds of secondary flowers (some referred to as “fillers” to bulk it up), and for these I turn to both the annual beds and the perennials.

The statice is still in bloom, and its papery bracts hold up well in July—I’ve even used them in July weddings. I didn’t love statice until I grew it; until then, I thought of it as outdated. It reminded me of the ugly things you found in 1980s craft stores (I know; I was there). Now I grow white, apricot and pale lavender-blue statice, and I love it as a fresh flower. Any of these colors will work into my bouquet.

In the perennial garden I find my favorite black-eyed susan, Rudbeckia subtomentosa (a native plant), just coming into bloom. There also fluffy sprays of whorled mountainmint (Pycnanthemum pilosum, another native) and short-toothed mountainmint (Pycnanthemum muticum, native east of here) and peppermint in bloom. The spearmint is starting to bloom, too. This reminds me to mention that fresh herbs are indispensable for bouquets. I try to include them every time.

Finally, I’ll add some extras and some fancy dancers. The ‘Chester’ blackberries are coming on at red stage. I’ll add a stem with a cluster to this bouquet. The nigella have gone to pod stage, and those dark stripes will pick up the colors in the sunflowers beautifully, and so will the ‘Black Knight’ scabiosa blooms that keep coming. I love those dark flowers. And the green seed heads of river oats will rustle above this bouquet. Just a few stems.

What a great combination of material. What abundance and beauty.

I like to include 15 or 20 stems for nice, full market bouquets: about five focal flowers, then about three stems each of possibly four accent flowers, and one stem of the really special extras (like the blackberries). So sometimes it’s more than 20 stems. I cut all the stems, strip the foliage that will go below the water, and let them rest in water in a “warm” cooler, about 40°F, for a few hours (except the zinnias—just 20 minutes or long enough to get the field heat out of them).

Then I take it all, set up the piles of individual flowers, and make the group of bouquets with the flowers at about the same level, secure them with rubber bands, and cut the stems evenly. Then I take brown kraft paper sheets—these will have been stamped with my custom-designed rubber stamp with my logo, my website url, and some text about weddings and workshops, because I got tired of buying labels that are just going to get recycled or trashed—and I wrap each bouquet carefully. I set four bouquets into a two-gallon black plastic bucket for a clean presentation, not too crowded.

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And now the question: What should a market bouquet cost? If I were buying the flowers wholesale to make the bouquets, I’d pay about 75 cents a stem for the zinnias and $1 a stem for the sunflowers. The native plants I don’t even see on the wholesale market. A bunch of 10 stems might cost an average wholesale price, $8. Blackberries would cost more, for fewer stems. The other flowers could vary in price, but a long-time flower grower (who is from here and internationally famous among flower growers) once told me she wouldn’t charge less than 50 cents a stem (wholesale) for anything. So if there are 20 flowers in a bouquet, at an average of 75 cents each, wholesale, the wholesale cost of the loose flowers would be $15.

What else goes into the costs? The kraft paper sheets are inexpensive, but they take much more of my time to use than a premade sleeve would. The stamp was $45 for the design. There are rubber bands, buckets, tools needed for growing and cutting. The landscape fabric. Bob’s time. Compost. The tractor, the bed shaper. The time and gas and vehicle wear and tear to get the bouquets to a pick-up site. The cost to use the site where the customers pick up the bouquets ($35 per pick-up). The fees for online payment (2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction if you use PayPal). And tax, which is 9.3 percent in Lawrence. I might do a drop-off in Johnson County, which is about 45 minutes one way. Tax is 9.5 percent where my drop likely to be.

Most of all, it costs my time. And what it took for me to learn all this.

This is why people do enterprise budgets. They track every “input”—every flower, every tool, everyone’s time, everything on the back end—to determine the producer’s cost. Then there’s the question of what to charge, which determines your profit, if any. And you have to consider what the market will bear, the perception of the potential customer.

If I charge $30 for a full, gorgeous, fresh bouquet made entirely of flowers and herbs I grow, wrapped in brown paper stamped with my beautiful custom stamp, will that price feel right to the customer?

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Here’s what gets backed out of that $30 (not counting tools, time, compost, landscape fabric, rubber bands, buckets, brown paper, the custom stamp, Bob’s time and my time and helpers’ time, mileage): 1) $1.17 for PayPal and 2) $2.79 for tax, which leaves $26.04; is this my profit?

Say I sell 20 bouquets and make $26.04 each (not counting all the back-end costs). So $520.64, from which I subtract $35 for the pick-up, for a profit of $485.80. Right?

But I will need to set aside 20 percent of this, or $97.16, for income tax. So my profit might be considered $388.64; divided by 20 bouquets, this is $19.43. That’s what I take home and put in my bank account when I sell a $30 bouquet. And I have to crunch numbers and decide if it’s worth it, if it covers my costs and pays for my groceries and gas and the other expenses in my life—and if you’re a flower grower, you do, too.

Doing this as a business means going through each piece of what goes into the making of a market bouquet or a wedding bouquet from the flowers “I grow.” I don’t want to set up for mass production of bouquets and individual delivery. Those things depend on inexpensive labor (which might be my own, mostly). It’s a strange experience to count the cost of a particular kind of beauty—in dollars, in time, in assigning a value to time. We all consider daily what beauty is, whether we realize it or not, and what it’s worth, how we get it and where it comes from.