Video Home » One Dozen Red Roses - 90926 - 1-800-FLOWERS.COM

....Okay, we're ready to make our arrangement. We've unpacked our dozen beautiful long stem red roses. A classic, timeless way for people to send loving smiles to someone special in their life. The first thing that you want to do is check your roses to see if there are any bruised guard petals. Guard petals grow naturally around the rose, and we like to leave them on in shipping for a little more protection. They don't need to be removed, but if they seem a little extra bruised, just give it a little tug, and you'll see that your roses feel a little soft. They've been traveling for at least 24 hours to get to you, and by following these directions and getting them hydrated right away, you'll start to see them open up and stand up straight and tall and get beautiful and beautiful every day. The next thing you'll want to do is just check your stems and make sure that there's no leaves that would be below the water level. If there are, just pluck them off, because you don't want leaves in your water. It promotes bacterial growth and will shorten the vase life of your flowers. The flower food actually helps with that but it looks better also if there's no leaves in the water. It's a nice, cleaner look. You're going to take a rose, one stem at a time. Now you want to give it a good cut on the bottom of the stem on an angle using a sharp cutting shears. By cutting it on an angle, when you place it into the vase, it's not sitting flush against the bottom, and it allows the optimum uptake of water into the stem. So you'll just keep doing that with each of your roses, and start to do a crisscross in your vase by placing each rose on the opposite side of the outer rim of the vase. This will help to build a natural grid in the center, so when you get down to your last six roses, you'll be placing those in the center and it will hold them up naturally. Just keep going through the process here and cutting and adding to your vase until you've arranged all 12. Can you believe how easy it was to create such a beautifully elegant bouquet of red roses? The best part is that they're just going to get prettier every day, because now they're starting to hydrate, they'll start to open up, they'll become twice the size that they are now. The best way to make your roses last as long as possible would be to change the water, add flower food, and re-cut them every two to three days. You might find after a week that they're much shorter. Put them in a different type of container and enjoy a totally different look of beautiful red roses. Don't they just make you smile?