Pure sunshine

I have two forsythia shrubs in my front yard. They usually blossom around mid-April. Several years ago during a NY weekend in early February, we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and they had huge, beautiful forsythia arrangements in the entrance hall. I was puzzled: even though NY weather is milder than here, they simply couldn't have been blossoming this early, more than two months ahead of mine. So what was going on, were these flown from far away? A few days later, back home, I received my new Martha Stewart Living issue and they had an article on forcing branches to blossom inside during the winter. A-ha! An apparently well-known florist trick.

So I tried it immediately. The procedure in the magazine was a little complicated: you first needed to soak the bare branches in the bathtub for a whole day while weighing them down with rocks... I did it the first year, then read on the Web that you don't even have to bother. The branches are among the easiest and most eager to blossom there are. Good thing, because now I have a kid who uses the bathtub every night!

So here is how you do it.

You first go outside and cut the branches, obviously. Ideally, it should be on a day when the temperature is above freezing. You can do it anytime from say mid-January until mid-March. Before that, the plant will not have had enough of a winter rest, and after that, it's a little too close to its natural blossoming time and thus not really worth it.

You then put the branches in water. This is true for all flower arrangements, but a squeaky clean vase is the most important thing of all. Bacteria which developed with previous arrangements will inevitably rot the flowers very quickly. So what I do is a put a little bleach (perhaps a capful) in the vase, then fill it with water and let it soak for a little while, at least half an hour. Then you rinse it thoroughly, fill it again and place the branches in. No leaf or bud should be immersed in water, as this will also accelerate rotting.

The branches will blossom much quicker if you give them some sun and a high-humidity environment. So I place the vase near a window, put a dry-cleaning bag over it, then spritz some water inside every day (you will see, some droplets will form and stay inside the bag, which is a good thing). It's very unsightly, I know.


You should keep the bag on until you see that a few tiny yellow buds are just starting to burst open, like in the picture below. This year, probably because the winter has been unusually mild, this only took a few days. Some years it's a little longer than that, maybe a few weeks.


After that, full blossoming will happen within a day or two. Here is what it looks like in our house now: