Yellow Flowers

The word yellow covers far more ground in a flower shop than it does in a paint catalogue, and most disappointment with a yellow bouquet comes out of that gap.

There are four yellows, and they do not mix

Butter is the pale, faintly green yellow of a young tulip or a cream rose just opening. Acid is the hard, nearly lime yellow of certain chrysanthemums and of solidago. Gold is the saturated yellow at the centre of a sunflower. Apricot is not really yellow at all, but it is what people are usually reaching for when they ask for something warm and soft, and it is usually the right answer. Put butter and acid in the same vase and both of them look like an error. Keep to one and the bouquet holds together.

Yellow fades, and it fades unevenly

Yellow pigment is less stable in strong light than red or white. A yellow rose on a sunny windowsill goes cream at the petal edges inside two days while the centre stays saturated, and that reads as wilting even when the flower is still firm to the touch. Keep yellow out of direct afternoon sun and it holds its colour right to the end. It is the one colour where where you put the vase genuinely matters.

What is honestly available

Sunflowers are the exception to nearly everything else on this site, because they are a real California crop with a long run: March through October, with the novelty varieties arriving from July. In those months a sunflower is local, cheap and enormous. Outside them it is flown in and it shows. See sunflowers while the season is open.

The rest of the year, yellow in Los Angeles means roses, tulips, craspedia, and ranunculus in its February to May window. You will notice this collection is short, and that some of what is in it sits nearer cream and ivory than gold. That is not an oversight. It is what a warm palette looks like when it is built out of flowers that are genuinely good rather than flowers that match a swatch, which is roughly the argument of what is in season in Los Angeles.

What yellow is for

It is the least ambiguous colour we sell. It carries no romantic implication at all, which makes it the correct choice for a new job, a recovery, a thank you to somebody you do not know well, or a friendship that red would make awkward. It is a poor choice for a condolence, where the register is simply wrong and sympathy or white is the page you want.