As the weather cools and rain becomes the norm, the warmth of a space like the American River College Student Center calls to students and faculty alike. Students navigating the cafeteria and student center may notice that there is more than coffee and food for sale there. Each Thursday morning, ARC’s Floral Design students host a floral arrangement sale, offering a relatively inexpensive option for students, faculty and staff to purchase professionally designed floral arrangements that have been handcrafted by the students the night before.

“We get all our products out and get as much money back as we can, and that will buy the programs, because we don’t have lab fees,” said Suzanne O’Brien, an assistant professor of horticulture who designs all the floral arrangements that students build in class.

The students in this class learn more than just the concepts of floral care and design, however. There is also a central focus on industry preparation, and a key aspect of this preparation requires a little bit of math.

“Students are learning how we price [the flower arrangements],” O’Brien said. “They learn how to price [the flowers at] wholesale cost for the arrangement first, and then [at] retail costs.”

As essential to being able to understand retail versus market pricing, as well as having an understanding of how wholesaling works, there are, of course, the flowers. As beautiful as the arrangements turn out, there are many stages to make them. Students are taught to handle and process flowers at every stage of the floristry method, which for the Floral Design class starts every Monday.

When the flowers arrive from the wholesaler, Flora Fresh Inc., they are removed from a refrigerated truck.

“[The flowers and greens] are packaged in cellophane in cardboard boxes, and they’re not in any water,” said Ahtziri Gil, an ARC student worker… “We don’t know what stop we are on the truck driver’s route, [so] we don’t know how long they have been without water.”

After the flowers have been removed from the boxes, students in charge of helping manage the flower sale, as well as those in need of extra credit, strip the leaves off the stems of the flowers. The greens are also prepped, with students cutting the stems by hand and then placing them in water, where they will last for several weeks. This step is essential to help ensure the longevity of the flowers and greenery in the arrangements that are made later in the week.

“You take all the leaves off the stems because [the leaves] will rot in the water,” student Brendan Latroncia said. “It’s also less energy the plant is spending on the leaves and more energy [is going] to the flowers.”

There is one final step before the plants are placed in water. After the flowers are dipped a hydrating solution, they are placed in water and stored in either a refrigerated or a warming space, depending on the state of openness the flowers are in when they arrive, and will remain in storage until Wednesday night, when the real work begins.

Many steps must be completed before the arrangements can begin to come together during class periods on Wednesday evenings–stem cutting, greenery shining and container preparation all need to be completed before the arrangements can be assembled. Each of these steps is essential to the health and longevity of the arrangement. Each task is completed by a group of students working in tandem.

The first task needing to be completed is cutting and hydrating the flower stems. This is done using a special stem cutter that functions similarly to a guillotine–a tub of water is filled, and then the stem cutter is placed into the water.

“Part of processing flowers is you want to give it a fresh cut, and that basically increases the life of the flower because bacteria and air get trapped in the stem, and this fresh cut takes away from that,” said  Bill McFall, an ARC student.

After the stems are cut, they are briefly placed in a special solution known as QuickDip, which serves as a hydrating plant food, but also as an antibacterial treatment. This solution is necessary because of how easy it is for bacteria to infiltrate a plant’s stem, and since floral arrangements require several stems to be very close together, it is extremely easy for bacteria to spread between the plants. The QuickDip, however, is just one of many steps taken by students to ensure the health and longevity of their arrangements.

“[You’ve] got to wash out your buckets, sanitize all your tools, everything you’re using because you never know if a plant might be sick, and then you cut a different plant, then you would be transferring that disease,” Gil said.

Any error in cleanliness can and will lead to the early death of an arrangement, which damages the customer relationships, so prioritizing disinfecting tools and stems serves as an essential step in the process.

The next step that occurs on the other side of the outdoor workspace is greenery preparation. After the greens are sorted, students begin to coat the leaves that naturally have a brighter, bolder color in a spray that helps the leaves shine for longer and makes the whole arrangement more appealing. This shine is not applied to leaves that have more muted colors, such as Silver Dollar Eucalyptus, which is used in the Thanksgiving Cornucopia arrangement.

After the greens and flowers are done being processed, the students on the greenery team finish forming the plant bundles that contain all the flowers and greenery that will be needed to put the arrangement together, and pass them out while the third team of students sets up the containers.

Some floral arrangements done by the class are designed with vases and water as their containers, and others, like the Thanksgiving Cornucopia, were created using foam blocks soaked in water inside a decorative container.

“Our water source is the foam; it’s like a sponge,” O’Brien said. “The foam goes in the plastic liner, and then the plastic liner goes in the container. Sometimes we tape them, but with this container it looks tacky, so we’re not going to do that for [the cornucopias].”

The foam blocks serve as more than a water source, however, they also serve as the structural base for the floral arrangement that allows the flowers and plants to take on the shapes that provide the arrangement with color, volume and variety.

After everyone has their tools, plants and containers, the real magic begins. Since this is a class, students follow guidance from the course instructor, but what makes the process so unique is that there is an inherent flexibility within the industry of floral design.

“Not one technique is correct, not one technique is the right way,” Gil said. “If you leave here still wanting to do your own method, that’s perfectly fine. We are just teaching [students] the basics, and how we do it because it gives [them] a different perspective on how to do something.”

Over the course of the class time, students cut their plants down to the proper length and begin inserting the stems into the foam, starting with the ferns, which are focused at the bottom of the arrangement to help create a full, fluffy appearance that supports the flowers. Each plant is carefully selected to create a cohesive color scheme and eye-catching appearance.

Students say there are still many ways this bustling floral design program could expand and improve. Currently, there are many plans in the works, including potential collaboration with the newly expanded funeral services department.

“We’ve been talking about crossing this kind of bridge for many years, and in my position, it always felt very hard to do [The funeral services department has] that chapel now, that special place for them,” O’Brien said. “We’re creating [funeral] arrangements [in the funeral class], so there are people from the funeral service education department that take this class sometimes, like, they go together.”

The ARC horticulture program is one of the school’s oldest (and most academically flexible) programs, and is beloved by the students who are pursuing degree and certificate pathways. It is also one of the programs with not just the most robust industry preparation focus, but also has an individual focus in mind. Students are able to change their own degree pathways to ensure that the classes they are taking will be best for their future careers, which provides students with autonomy and confidence that they are getting the education that will be the most transferable to their future plans.

“I love to tell people about it. I love to talk about it. I tell them what we do and everything. And from what I can tell, they get pretty excited,” Gil said.

After the sale, extra arrangements are brought back to the classroom and sold at half price the next week, helping further ensure that as little plant material as possible ends up going to waste. Indeed, the Floral design sale provides a very special opportunity for students, staff and faculty alike to buy beautiful arrangements that are made and designed with love and care and for the Floral design students to prepare for their careers as florists and horticulture professionals. The floral design class also provides a special place for students of all walks of life to express themselves creatively in a unique and fulfilling way. For more information about the ARC Florist program, visit the American River College website’s Horticulture page, and for more information about the floral sale, visit the Horticulture Department’s Instagram.