#this time with pictures

[oreramar]

Florist Talk: Funerals

Time to talk about the morbid side of floristry, the true bread-and-butter of the business, the dark elephant in the room: funerals and all they entail from this particular angle.

As always, keep in mind that this is from the personal experience of someone working in a small shop in the US and as such isn't gonna be full of universal truths. Use what I share as inspiration for your own writing and change what you must to make cultural sense of things.

First of all, here's a hard truth: your Florbo might well make more flower shop money from funeral pieces than from all the birthdays, anniversaries, congratulations and love-you's that might otherwise fill their days. Funeral arrangements tend toward the big and showy, with the center pieces like casket or urn sprays being the Most of all.

Heckin look at these things ^ Nobody but the rich is buying this kind of nonsense for an anniversary that comes around once a year, every year.

In short, Funerals are kinda important to the business side of things, so a Florbo might occasionally talk about them or reflect on that, depending on how philosophical you/your story/your character would tend to be.

So here's a few other details just to know or consider:

A Florbo will keep track of Obituaries for work. This could mean a subscription to the local newspaper and cutting the obits out every day it comes, or keeping local funeral homes' websites as pinned addresses on their browser. Yes this does look on the surface like the kind of thing a death-obsessed goth teen would do as a special interest. Do as you will with that knowledge.

They will also, as I said in my overview post, know the local Funeral People by name. They are essentially Business Associates. A good relationship with the people at a local Funeral Chapel means extra business as they will recommend Florbo's shop to those who ask, and they will default to ordering from Florbo whenever a family leaves those details to them. A poor relationship means Florbo's competition will get that business instead.

Sometimes funeral families - relatives of the deceased put in charge of ordering the official funeral flowers - come in person to look at pictures and flowers and decide what they want. This could be done in minutes. It could take them an hour. They could be in good humor as they reminisce about the deceased, or they could be functioning at neutral or just barely holding it together. The last can be the hardest if Florbo is very empathetic in the "if you start crying I'll start crying" sort of way.

Knowing the date and time of a visitation is actually more important than the date and time of a funeral - they're rarely the same thing. Often, but not always, a visitation will be the night before a morning funeral, and flowers/plants/gifts need to be delivered a couple of hours before visit. so that the funeral chapel people have time to place them on stands or easels.

Sometimes people will order something and tell Florbo the date for the funeral. Sometimes they will order something online and set the date for the funeral. Sometimes they will order something an hour or less before visitation starts reasoning that the funeral is tomorrow, so they aren't late. Florbo must be on top of all these things in order to get flowers to the visitation on time.

If your Florbo delivers flowers, and if you're writing a culturally US setting, then it might just follow that the Florbo will have seen more dead bodies than any other character aside from, say, a Mortician or similar role. This is because sometimes Florbo must carry the funeral flowers into the funeral chapel and place them on or around the funeral casket, in which already lies the funeral subject. An experienced Flower Delivery Florbo has been within arm's reach of bodies, multiple times.

Sometimes fate conspires so that the funeral chapel is closed and it is late when such a delivery is made (Florbo has a key or knows where an emergency key is hidden for such a situation) and it's winter so it's already dark outside as well as in, aside from a few low lights left on, and it's all in all very spooky feeling, being the only living person in the building and knowing there's also a corpse in the room.

Anyhow...

Aside from the big fanned-out floral pieces shown above, there are some key Types of florals exclusive to funerals, or at least very rarely encountered outside of them.

In order above: Casket Spray, Urn Spray, Hanging Spray and Wreath

All of these have particular frames and forms that help give them those uniform shapes. If you've ever wondered what's holding together the "big bouquet on top of the casket" at funerals (and why perhaps you should not throw it into the crowd to "see who dies next" wedding bouquet style), today's your lucky day.

First off, there's this plastic thing called a Casket Saddle, into which you place a block of green florist foam - aka wet foam, as it's designed to soak up water like anything. The foam is fixed in place either with those plastic cages or blocky U-shaped things in the first example, which snap into place snuggly over the foam, or with florist's tape if you use the cheap open saddles like the last example. Those are the ones I'm used to. The legs snap on, which means the frame is pretty useful for making hanging sprays without said legs attached.

The foam is thoroughly soaked - some casket saddles come with reservoir spaces inside them for more water to sit and feed into the foam as it dries over time - and greens and flowers are cut and inserted into the foam, which keeps them hydrated for a bit.

A big casket spray is unwieldy and, due to the soaked wet foam, kinda heavy. You can carry it fine, once you've managed to reach under and past all the hanging flowers and greens to find the saddle, but there's way more oomph there than a simple tied bouquet. It will not fling easily or lightly. In case you needed to know.

Also, sometimes people will order Script Ribbons on the spray - ribbons that say things like "Mom," "Grandma," "Great Grandma". These are going out of style a bit but are still common enough where I work to be worth mentioning. It's hard to get more than four ribbons into a single spray due to the size of them. Also the script names come as sticker sheets - you peel the cursive script stickers off and put them on the ribbons yourself.

Like this ^

When someone wants a script that doesn't exist on the sheets (for example, Grandma and Grandmother are standards here; Nana or Mimi are not) then you gotta use sheets of individual letters to spell the word(s) out bit by bit. Sometimes you don't have a single instance of a particular letter in the entire folder. Then you have to get creative and/or butcher some of the less-used scripts for scraps.

Typically we tell people that they should use the words/names they used to refer to that person, so "Mom" might be more appropriate to them than the more formal "Mother." That might vary culturally, though.

By the way, back to the wreaths and stuff - you might see those in shapes like Hearts or Crosses if you ever look it up. If you wonder how that's made, I've got the answer:

Floral foam again! Soak it and poke it (full of flowers and greens), easy as that.

For urn pieces, the place I work at just uses a circle wreath form, laid on the table, sometimes cut in half for a half-circle around the back but not front of the urn.

As a quick note while I remember - blocks of floral foam are also used to help those big fanned-out arrangements I showed at the start of this post in place. Wedge them into the containers at the base and they keep the flowers from just flopping all over the place, which is how you achieve that particular "long flower stems hovering perpendicular to the table" look at the bottoms.

So yeah! Florists and Funerals and all the details I can currently call to mind about them ^

[soapbbox]

A Quintesson attack leaves Megatron in need of repairs.

Let’s pretend this takes place early where Megatron isn’t incredibly paranoid about back stabbing (Starscream) yet

[dudedidujust]

The daily planet runs a front page article calling superman the light of mankind

Cue the batfam launching a counter campaign in support of Signal,  the real Light of Mankind.

It starts as a joke but quickly derails into an all out war.

[momoiro-hime]

putting my ocs in every AU i want part. 34791

| Do NOT repost or use without permission.

[knucklestheenchilada]

If I could blaze this picture of my cat I would

Ah! Caduceus says thank you for the love!!

[bakedbeanchan]

AU where the timeline gets reset but Zuko still has all his memories. Now in comic form

The backstory for this drawing

[notrobinsomethingworse]

Kid!Tim, showing Robin his room: So we have my photography cubby, not to be confused by my homework cubby. Then my desk, bed, conspiracy wall, wardrobe, other desk for my conspiracy wall-

Robin!Jason, nodding along with a fake smile. Pointing towards a side desk with candles and several framed photos of Batman: And what’s that over there.

Tim: oh that’s just my Batman shrine.

Jason: Ah.

Tim: Anyway! This is the kennel for all four of my stuffed dogs, my bookshelf for my conspiracy wall-

[time-woods]

oh that same old familiar tune, where have i heard it before?

oh, right with you.

this took me a little while to complete- the uncompressed file size ended up being 101mb. . . beeeg file,

[planetlongjourney]

Ds9 characters going through genuinely the worst trauma over and over again, finding new ways to have the most horrendous time:

Ds9 crew in the next episode:

[thebreadmantm]

I don’t know why I have decided that cat!Jon is just a stinky little boy. He needs a bath. Musty little brat

@ultramarinaa I hope you know how much theses little shits have infected by brain, I have drawn nothing but cats and there is no end in sight. I love these lill guys

[doctorsiren]

The books reveal that Ford is actually a secret partier

(Available as a print on my Etsy Shop)

(wips under cut)

[percabetn]

i can’t stop thinking about how annabeth e-mailed percy the photo of her at dc but this doofus decided to print it and put it in his notebook to stare at her whenever he could. talk about dedication

[gingermintpepper]

I think, perhaps one of the funniest things to come from EPIC popularising the Odyssey is that now a ton of people think Poseidon wanted to kill Odysseus.

In the Odyssey, Poseidon has no intention of killing Odysseus. In fact, part of the whole reason Zeus lets Poseidon do whatever he wants even though he thinks Odysseus is rad and should get to kiss his wife is explicitly because Poseidon had no intentions of killing Odysseus. Poseidon wanted to pay back the suffering/inconvenience blinding Polyphemus would have caused. It's a really abstract thing tbh. How do you pay back someone permanently disabling your son? Poseidon's solution was just to amputate Odysseus from his other half; i.e. Penelope. The end game was never murder, it was always an endurance race.

(Od. Book 1: Zeus reassuring Athena that he is not, in fact, a part of Odysseus Hater-Nation. Trans. Robert Fagles)

Also, for those wondering if there's any sort of in text reason for why Poseidon wasn't around in God Games - at the time in the Odyssey when Athena petitions Zeus to let Odysseus leave Calypso's island, Poseidon was -checks notes- on vacation in Ethiopia. Yep. He left to Ethiopia for a festival and thusly was very much absent for Athena's whole "please let Ody go? Please? 🥺" request.

(Od. Book 1: While Odysseus was suffering, Poseidon went to party in the east)

I am begging y'all to read the Odyssey. It's a comedy for everyone except Odysseus and Penelope who are, in fact, suffering 24/7 365.

[straycalamities]

loses sleep to draw hyperfixation art it's fine

[anna-scribbles]

resolutions

[yashley]

A soup? Time's a weird soup? Is that a saying where you're from?