One of the corniest ways through which an admirer demonstrates their interest is indeed doing it the old fashioned way of getting you flowers, and by corny of course I mean deeply appreciated. In fact, I prefer to refer to it as being old school instead of old fashioned. What if love blossoms and you find yourself in a situation where he comes over to your house a couple of weeks after buying you flowers and you’re embarrassed by the state in which they’ve become?
The ability to take care of flowers is just a reciprocation of the intentions shown by the suitor with their efforts to get you the flowers in the first place, so you can at least try to learn how to take care of them. Sure, they’ve definitely long since died by the time they’re passed on from his hands to yours, but the basics of biology are such that mere fresh water goes a long way in preserving their fresh appearance a little longer and slowing down the withering process.
If you take good care of a bunch of roses for example they can last up to an entire month looking beautiful in a vase, but that’s an extreme case. Aim for two and a half weeks and you can lay claim to being able to look after flowers well.
Put them in a vase
This is the no-brainer part of proceedings and it comes rather instinctively, doesn’t it. The first thing you do when you get home is fill up a vase to three-quarters of the capacity and simply place the flowers in, preferably one by one and spread out as much as possible. Before you place them in the vase however, you should probably rinse each of them under running tap water. Wet the stem all the way up to the petals.
This is about as fresh and pretty as you’ll have them, so enjoy displaying them. This is also when the sweet flowery scent will be at its most potent, but otherwise as they wither you’ll be able to catch a rather refreshing whiff every now and then, effectively reminding you of the whole gesture all over again.
Pick out the withered stems
Okay, so what this means is that the original bunch is slowly going to get smaller and smaller, dictated to by the rate at which individual flowers wither and therefore have to be removed from the vase. As each one withers just pick it out and always but always fill the vase back up with fresh water. Pick out some of the dead leaves and other debris which makes its way into the water before filling up again and also pick off the visibly dead bits from some of the stems which bear flowers that are still fresh enough to keep in the vase.
As mentioned, this way the bunch will get smaller and smaller, but the most resilient of the flowers in the original bunch will fight on and keep the place looking and smelling good.