Freesias: the scent, the spring season and care

A bunch of freesias under 10 euro will scent a whole room. A 50 euro box of imported roses will not scent the table it stands on, because the varieties bred for a week in a cold chain lost their perfume on the way. For anyone buying flowers for the smell rather than the look, that is the single most useful fact about the Irish flower shelf.

The catch is that freesias are quiet to look at. Thin stems, small trumpets in a row along a curved spike, nothing to see from across a room. They are a flower for a hall table or a bedside, not a statement in a window.

What freesias mean

Friendship, trust and thoughtfulness. That is the meaning in general florist use, and it is worth being straight about where it comes from: the freesia reached Europe from South Africa in the nineteenth century and arrived too late for the Victorian language of flowers to fix a meaning on it. What it carries now is a modern florist convention, repeated until it became true enough.

It is also listed as the seventh wedding anniversary flower, which is the same kind of convention from the same source.

The practical reading is that a freesia is warm without being romantic, which makes it one of the easiest flowers to give someone whose reaction to a red rose would be complicated.

Season in Ireland

Freesias are Dutch glasshouse flowers and they are on sale every week of the year. The real season, in the sense of quality and price, is spring: February to May sees the best stems, the most buds per spike and the lowest prices, and the scent is stronger on spring stock than on the summer crop.

There is no Irish commercial freesia growing. Gardeners here grow them in pots and under glass, and corms planted in spring will flower in late summer outdoors in a mild garden, but nothing from that reaches a shop.

March is the month to reach for them. Irish Mother's Day always falls in March, three weeks before Easter, and a mixed bunch of freesias and tulips that week costs a fraction of a rose bouquet and does more in the room.

When to send them, and when not to

Freesias suit thanks, an apology, a bedside, a nursing home, and anyone recovering at home. The scent is the gift and it works even where somebody is not up to looking at flowers.

They are good in a hospital only where the ward allows flowers at all, which many Irish hospitals do not, so ring first rather than sending anything.

Do not send them where the look has to carry the room. A freesia bunch on its own in a large vase looks sparse, and they earn their place in a mixed arrangement or a small vase.

Do not send them to someone sensitive to perfume, and think about a small office for the same reason: what reads as lovely in a hall can be too much at the next desk.

Care

Cut 2cm off each stem with a sharp blade. The stems are thin and hollow-feeling and crush easily, so scissors are worse here than on most flowers.

Keep the water shallow and cool, and change it every second day. Freesias take up little water and a deep vase does nothing for them.

Pinch each flower off the spike as it browns. This is the whole trick with freesias: the spike opens in sequence from the base to the tip, and clearing the spent blooms keeps the rest coming. Left alone, a bunch stops halfway through with buds still on it.

Keep them away from ripening fruit. Freesias are among the more ethylene-sensitive flowers on the shelf and a fruit bowl on the same table will stop the buds opening at all. The rest of the general care advice applies as usual: clean vase, sachet in the water, no direct sun.