Red Flowers

Red is the only colour customers describe to us by naming an emotion instead of a shade, which is why it is the one we most often get wrong on the first attempt.

Dark red and bright red are not the same gift

A deep red rose, the near-black velvet sort, photographs badly and looks extraordinary in person. Through a phone camera indoors it collapses into a dark shape with no detail in it. Across a room in daylight it has more depth than anything else we sell. A bright, clear red does the reverse: it photographs beautifully and can look slightly flat on the table.

So the question worth asking, and the one nobody asks, is where the flowers are going to be seen. If the point is a photograph that will be sent to three people within the hour, choose the brighter red. If the point is a table somebody will sit at all evening, choose the darker one.

Red is hard to mix and easy to ruin

Red sits badly beside pink and beside orange, and it swallows anything paler put next to it. The combinations that hold are red with white, red with deep green foliage, and red on its own. That last one is why most of this collection is single-variety, and why the argument in the mono-bouquet, and why it is harder applies here more than anywhere.

The occasions red is wrong for

Red means one thing here and it is not subtle. It is the wrong colour for a condolence, for a colleague, for a hospital room a whole family will walk into, and for anybody whose reaction to it might be embarrassment. Those have better pages: sympathy, get well, for him. Where red is exactly right is an anniversary, a proposal, a Lunar New Year gift where the colour carries luck rather than romance, and any occasion where being unambiguous is the entire point.

One practical note

Red roses show damage more plainly than pale ones, because a bruise on a dark petal goes black rather than brown. That is why we buy fewer and better stems for red than we would for a mixed bouquet at the same money, and why a red mono-bouquet costs more than it looks as though it should.