On Sagg Main Street in Sagaponack, close enough to the ocean to get a whiff of salt air, a strikingly pretty greenhouse beckons from the fields, surrounded by rows of perennial grasses and flowers. But blink and you’ll miss it: a small sign near the street promoting “Summer subscription bouquets, starting at $25,” which happen to be made onsite entirely with the greenhouse’s own flower and plant material. “My team and I were talking about the sustainability aspect of picking flowers that you grow yourself and trying a new approach to floral arrangements,” explains Catherine Warren, the owner of Broadview Gardens and its airy twin-roofed greenhouse. “Why not use things that are locally harvested on the land?”
With the help of Clémence Buffard Soulard, a seasonal volunteer intern from Saumur, a city in France’s Loire Valley, Warren came up with the idea of a bouquet-a-week subscription program for “people who would frequently come in and ask, ‘Do you have any cut flowers for a hostess gift?’ And we’ve always had to send them to King Kullen. We figured, the flowers grow in abundance here anyway, and they need to be groomed and deadheaded, so we might as well go ahead and start making arrangements ourselves. Plus, we have so much interesting plant material that we can add to the bouquets, such as eucalyptus and uncommon roses that you won’t find anywhere else.”
Freshly cut flora immediately get a drink of water before the stems are meticulously cleaned.
The stems are meticulously cleaned.
Most bouquets include unusual roses not commonly found at other garden centers.
Stems stripped of leaves and tightly cut will make a bouquet last longer.
Finished bouquets are tied with a length of raffia.
Finished bouquets are tied with a length of raffia.
Volunteer intern Clémence Buffard Soulard (left) finishes a floral arrangement made entirely from locally harvested plant material, part of the summer bouquet subscription program that is the latest offering from Broadview Gardens greenhouse owner Catherine Warren (right).
Arranging flowers comes naturally to Soulard, who “grew up in a house where my mom always had a freshly picked bouquet on the table,” she recounts. “My love of flowers comes from that.” In the early morning, clippers in hand, Soulard roams the Sagaponack property, cutting foliage and flora from planted beds and a variety of pots, then hauls it back to the greenhouse to be quickly immersed in water, followed by thorough stem cleaning. “Cleaning flowers is definitely not the fun part,” Soulard says with a laugh. “In France, I was lucky to find a floral designer who gave me the chance to work in her shop, and you start out the hard way, by learning how to clean the stems properly.”
Next, Soulard gives the stems a fresh cut, making sure no leaves will remain below a vase’s water line, which fends off bacteria and allows the blooms to last longer. The initial cut, she says, is as “important as changing the water and giving a fresh cut every two days.” To build the bouquets, she starts with a “structured flower base, like eucalyptus,” followed by flowers, native grasses, and even attractive weeds. “When you want to see a really nice flower, placing some unexpected material alongside it makes it pop more, even if you’re using a weed.” Warren agrees, adding, “Weeds are plants, and each has a unique characteristic that lends textural dimension to a bouquet, giving it a sort of tapestry effect while also looking more modern.”
Final arrangements are tied at the base with a length of raffia and placed in a refrigerated room for customer pickups on Thursdays or Fridays. “People like to have a little bouquet in their homes, especially on the weekends,” says Warren. Weekly subscription customers typically receive qa freestyle arrangement, often accented with a special stem or two from Broadview Gardens’ unusual rose collection, which Warren has been cultivating for years. “Many rose gardeners come in and say, ‘I’ve been looking for that rose—something like ‘Tuscany Superb’ or ‘Silver Cloud’—for years. I enjoy offering our customers something different.” For her part, Soulard embraces the notion of incorporating roses that are “not so perfect-looking. It’s nice to think how they had a life before and still have a little bit of life in them, ultimately giving character to a bouquet. Sometimes the imperfection makes them perfect.”