Cut orchids: the expensive stem that outlasts everything else
Nobody buys cut orchid by accident. A stem costs noticeably more than a rose, and it behaves differently in return: five to fifteen flowers on a single branch, and a fortnight or more of vase life from it.
It is worth separating this from the potted orchid on a windowsill. A pot is a plant somebody has to keep alive for months. A cut orchid stem is a bouquet with an unusually long run.
The three you will actually meet
Florist orchids come mostly from three groups, and they are not interchangeable.
Cymbidium is the workhorse. Large firm flowers along a long stem, the most common orchid in cut work, and remarkably tolerant of transport.
Phalaenopsis is the familiar shape from every hotel lobby. In cut form it is sold individually, usually with a water tube on the stem.
Dendrobium carries many smaller flowers on one branch. It costs less than the other two and earns its place when the brief calls for volume.
Almost none of them have any scent worth mentioning. For a hospital room, an office, or anyone sensitive to fragrance, that silence is a genuine advantage rather than a shortcoming.
Keeping them going
Orchids are undemanding, but their rules are not the rules for roses.
Recut with a sharp knife at an angle, and repeat every few days. Keep the water shallow, around five centimetres. The stem dislikes standing deep for long stretches.
Then keep them away from the fruit bowl. Ripening apples and bananas give off ethylene, and orchids react to it more sharply than most flowers: buds drop before they ever open. That single mistake is the commonest reason an expensive stem finishes early.
What kills a cut orchid is not time. It is a draught, a warm room, and a bowl of ripe fruit on the same table.
Who it suits
Orchid reads as restraint rather than romance, which makes it one of the few flowers that can be sent to a manager, a business partner, a teacher, a doctor or a colleague without implying anything at all.
It also solves the problem of a gift that has to last. One branch in a narrow vase holds a room for two weeks and asks for nothing beyond an occasional trim.
For delivery in Melbourne it travels well, since the flowers grip the stem and do not shed when jolted. The one thing worth requesting is a water tube on the cut end, particularly in summer or when the flowers will wait at a reception desk.
The JFLOO catalogue keeps cut orchids separate from potted plants. Where the brief is a long lasting gift with no scent and no maintenance, this stem does the job better than almost anything else on the shelf.
