IMG_0701

(Re)Flexing Your Craft Muscle

Many factors influence a person’s choice of career. As a florist, there might be a passion for decorating, and designing, or a hunger to be involved in large scale events, but at the heart of it all, there must be an undeniable love of flowers.

Mother Nature provides us with such a gorgeous array of flowering plants, which in turn become cut flowers. Funny thing is, we often find new ways to present those flowers rather than leave them in their natural state. There are so many ways to decorate with flowers, and the longer I am in the industry the more I see, and the more I experiment with.

We manipulate the seasons so that we may enjoy our favourite blooms almost year round.

We import blooms from all over the world as we have an insatiable desire that we are seemingly unable to fulfill with what we can produce ourselves.

We colour or dye the blooms, sometimes in such subtle, natural ways, that people are led to believe it is some of Mother Nature’s finest work. At other times, we dye flowers for something different, something in fashion, or perhaps just to fulfil a colour brief….I mean, blue is one of the most popular corporate colours and there are not many true blue flowers in the world, so what were we to do?

We create artificial stems or structures so that we are able to manipulate the bloom within a design.

Floristry has become about far more than simply arranging fresh cut flowers.

One of the current trends is for a rose to have the first and second most outer layers of its petals peeled back to create the most amazing staged version of a rose ‘blooming’. The technique is called “reflexing”. It is a technique that requires a gentle touch and a whole lot of patience as you need to delicately peel the rose petal back and flip it in the opposite direction to the way it naturally grows. When you reflex a rose, you expose the rose head, and are able to create a bloom that is 2-3 times the size of an average rose.

Reflexed Rose arrangement
Flowers by Hermetica via Pinterest
Reflexed rose arrangement
Reflexed Rose arrangement via Brittany Asch Pinterest

Rose reflexing is being used everywhere by everyone, becoming quite the showstopper for events and large scale installations, and it totally makes sense right? If you have the ability to make a Rose look visually much bigger than it actually is, of course it is going to be front and centre in your arrangement.

Reflexing is not a technique that is only confined to roses either. As a young florist I was initially taught how to reflex tulips, which in my opinion is simpler, although it is quite easy to bruise the tulip petal. These days a quick google search of #reflexed will deliver you pictures of almost every type of flower imaginable, turned back on itself. Like all things, not everyone is a fan…and some even hashtag their pics #tortured.

Reflexed tulip. Source: Floral Design Institute

I’d love to know if you are a fan of reflexed blooms or not?

Fwf x

Featured Image: Via Florelle

Leave a Reply