Spotty flowers!!

December 27, 2008 7:59 AM

How do you deal with brown spots on roses? I'm posting for my mom and sister who are non-professionally doing my cousin's wedding flowers for tonight. Some of the flowers have brown spots - is there any way to deal with this? Cut the rose petals with scissors? Google is yielding nothing but, "Don't use flowers with brown spots."
posted by artychoke to home & garden (3 comments total)

When I was in high school I used to work as a delivery guy for a local florist. As I recall, they used to pull off the less attractive outer petals. (In fact, this seemed to be an ongoing daily task, until the roses sold)
posted by barkingpumpkin at 8:14 AM on December 27, 2008

Barkingpumpkin has it. If the brown spots are on the outer petals just pinch the offending petals between your thumb and finger, one at a time, and pull the entire petal off. That's what a florist would do. If the brown spots are from bruising (on the tips of the inner petals) or disease (botrytis rot that goes deep into many layers of petals), those roses might not be salvageable. You could possibly use some of the petals from those roses for a basket of rose petals, or for whatever else you might want to use loose petals.
posted by Balonious Assault at 8:54 AM on December 27, 2008

Thanks! That's what we did and what I thought the answer would be - we were hoping for a magical additional solution. Anyway, the flowers are about done and thanks for the answers!
posted by artychoke at 9:31 AM on December 27, 2008