It doesn’t matter how often you remind your partner that Valentine’s Day is coming up, there are still hundreds of lovers who will still make a mad dash to the supermarket on February 14 in hope that there’s a bunch of roses left on the shelves.
But let’s face it, the plastic wrapped bouquet with the £5 price sticker barely ripped off just doesn’t say ‘I love you’ in the way you’d like to think it does.
However, there are a few super easy and, most importantly, FREE ways to elevate your supermarket blooms in less than half an hour - making your flowers look five times the price you paid for them.
I picked up a bunch of 15 long stemmed red roses at Sainsbury’s for £5, and aimed to make them look like a floristry masterpiece - so no-one would know they’ve been wilting away in an empty bucket for their final hours in the store.
When I got home, I snipped the end of each stem a small amount and left them sitting in water while I dug out a vase.
I started off by cutting off the cellophane wrapper and laying my blooms in a row, one by one removing the majority of the foliage, leaving one or two leaves on each rose.
Fill your vase with water and add either the sachet of solution that comes with most supermarket flowers, or you can add a sprinkle of sugar, or a teaspoon of bleach. A small amount of bleach keeps the water clean so that the flowers last longer between water changes.
Then, I put them into groups of five and cut the stems into three different lengths - small, medium and large, cutting on an angle to allow the flowers to drink up more water.
In staggering the lengths of the stems, it creates a really full looking bouquet when they’re organised in the vase - just make sure your shortest stem is still slightly taller than whatever you plan to put them in.
After cutting the stems, I flipped each rose upside down and rubbed the stem back and forth between my hands - imagine like you’re trying to warm your hands in the cold!
This helps the rose to ‘relax’, opening up the petals so that they’re not as tightly packed. Following this step, the roses look better already - but there’s still one more way to make them extra luxurious looking.
Starting from the outermost petals, I reflexed each one so that it was ‘inside out’, so that the petals bend backwards, rather than curl inwards.
Having completed this step with the outside petals, I took my thumb and forefinger and pushed them into the centre of the rose to spread them out, as if I was attempting to zoom in on a photo on a phone.
Once I’d finished all the roses, I started arranging them in the vase so that the different length stems created a fuller look, with no gaps.
Et voila - with zero floristry experience, you can make a £5 bunch of supermarket flowers look like you paid £25 at a florist.
