Christmas is the busiest fortnight of the year for Irish florists after
Valentine's Day, and almost none of it is bouquets. It is wreaths, table
arrangements, poinsettias and grave flowers, made in a rush in a cold workroom
in the second week of December.
Door wreaths
A fresh made-up wreath from an Irish florist costs 45 to 90 euro depending on
size and how much is on it. Garden centres and Christmas markets sell simpler
ones from about 25 to 45. Both are usually built on a moss or straw base with
noble fir, blue spruce or Nordmann, then trimmed with cones, dried orange,
cinnamon, eucalyptus and whatever the maker likes.
What to ask for, in order of how much difference it makes:
- Noble fir if you can get it. It holds its needles far longer than spruce
in a mild, wet Irish December.
- A wire or moss base rather than foam. It lasts better and it composts.
- A weatherproof ribbon. A velvet bow on a rain-facing door is a week of
colour and then a wet rag.
Expect three to four weeks on a normal Irish front door. Sun and heat are what
shorten it, so a south-facing door in a bright December, or a wreath hung inside
over a radiator, will be dropping needles inside a fortnight.
Wreath-making workshops have become one of the better things about an Irish
December. They run through late November and December at florists, garden
centres and community halls, usually cost 55 to 85 euro including all the
materials, and you leave with a wreath you made and a reasonable idea of how to
do it again. It is not cheaper than buying one. It is a better evening.
The genuinely cheap version is a walk. Holly, ivy, and a few bits of spruce off a
hedge, wired onto a supermarket wire ring, costs nothing and looks like a
Christmas in a house rather than a Christmas from a shop.
Table arrangements
Low candle arrangements for a Christmas table run 45 to 90 euro from a florist,
and the same rules apply as at a wedding: low enough to talk across, and built so
the candle can actually be lit without setting fire to the eucalyptus.
The practical problem is the table itself, which on Christmas Day is holding
everything else. A long, narrow arrangement down the centre, or two small ones,
works far better than one large centrepiece that has to be lifted off before the
turkey arrives.
Amaryllis is the flower of an Irish Christmas that most people underuse. One
bulb in a pot, bought at the start of December for about 12 to 20 euro, throws up
a stem and flowers for two or three weeks, and it costs a fraction of a delivered
arrangement.
Poinsettias, and why they die
Poinsettias are a tropical shrub sold in a country where the average December
day is six degrees and wet, and nearly every one that dies is killed by the same
sequence.
In the shop. A plant stacked outside a shop door or under an entrance
draught is already damaged when you buy it. Pick one from the middle of the
display, well inside.
On the way home. Five minutes across a car park unsleeved, or twenty minutes
in a cold boot, is enough. Ask for a sleeve and keep it on until you are in the
house.
In the house. They want 15 to 20 degrees, bright indirect light, and no
draughts. The worst place in an Irish house is exactly where most of them end up:
a windowsill, behind a curtain that gets closed at night, which turns into a cold
pocket several degrees below the room.
Watering. Water when the top of the compost feels dry, then let it drain
fully. Never leave one standing in a saucer of water. More poinsettias are
drowned than dried out.
Yellowing leaves that drop are the cold and draught story. Wilting with wet
compost is root rot from over-watering. Neither is fixable once it is well
started, so the buying and the journey home matter more than the care.
Delivery cutoffs
The last pre-Christmas delivery date is earlier than people plan for, because
courier networks in Ireland are at full stretch in the final week.
Most services take their last deliveries on 23 or 24 December, with the 24th
often limited to certain areas and morning slots. Nothing goes on Christmas Day
or St Stephen's Day, and the days between St Stephen's Day and New Year run a
reduced service.
Order by around 15 December if you want a real choice of what to send and a
delivery date you picked rather than one you were given. Letterbox flowers have
their own posting deadline, usually a day or two earlier than the courier one,
and they need a couple of days out of the box to open, so treat 20 December as
the last comfortable date for those.
The module below carries each service's own published cutoffs with the date they
were checked, which is more reliable than any date typed into a sentence in
August.
Flowers for a grave
A large part of what Irish florists make in December goes to cemeteries. Grave
wreaths, small holly arrangements and pots of winter greenery are ordinary
Christmas practice here, and many parishes hold a remembrance ceremony in the
cemetery in the weeks before the day.
Order these in the first half of December. The week before Christmas is when
everyone remembers, and it is the week a florist has least room to make anything.
If you are sending on behalf of somebody who cannot get to the grave themselves,
say so when ordering, and ask for a photograph. Most local florists will do it
without being asked twice, and it is worth more to the person at the other end
than the wreath is. There is more on sending flowers after a death, and on the
timing of it, on our sympathy flowers hub.