Gifts for Flower Lovers Who Grow Better Bouquets Than the Florist | Bluegrass Gifts

The Bouquet Problem: They Grow Better Ones Than the Shop Does

Most gifts for flower lovers start at the florist’s counter, and that is the trouble. The person you are shopping for grew better zinnias than that in August, cut them before breakfast and gave half of them away. A shop bouquet says you noticed the flowers. It wilts by Friday, and it says nothing about the gardener.

The best gifts for flower lovers are the things a gardener runs out of but rarely replaces, like gloves that fit or seed of a variety they keep meaning to try, or something that stays with the garden through winter, like their name on it. Skip the cut flowers; they already grow better ones.

The second kind is the one we make. Our Personalized Garden Sign, a carved gift for flower lovers that stays up all winter, puts the gardener’s name and GARDEN in clean serif capitals with a leafy sprig carved between them, over a line of your choosing. The sample reads LINDA’S GARDEN, GROWN WITH LOVE AND A LITTLE DIRT.

Flower people own the trowel, the kneeling pad and opinions about both. So here is the honest field first, the gifts worth buying whether or not you buy from us, then the case for the sign.

Gifts for Flower Lovers, Starting With What They Actually Run Out Of

Look by a serious gardener’s back door in March and the evidence is right there: a glove with a fingertip worn through, a stack of plastic pots, a seed packet with three seeds left in it. The best practical gifts come straight off that list.

What flower people actually run out of, a checklist to hold up against their potting bench:

• Gloves that fit. Most gardeners keep wearing a pair long after a fingertip goes. Check the size on the pair by the door; a glove that fits beats a pretty one that doesn’t.
• Seed of the one they keep circling. Every flower person has a variety they mean to try next year. Ask what is dog-eared in the catalog instead of guessing.
• Vases. Anyone with a cutting garden gives bouquets away all summer, and the vases rarely come back. Plain glass in a few sizes gets filled by June.
• Plant labels and a pencil. By fall, half of spring’s labels are unreadable or missing.
• Twine, ties and stakes. Anything tall, from sunflowers to dahlias, can lean or flop after one summer storm without them.
• Potting mix and mulch, by the bag. The heaviest thing on the list, and the one they are most tired of hauling out of the trunk.
• Hand cream and a nail brush. For the end of the day, when the dirt comes inside with them.

Then there are gifts that last past the season, harder to wrap and better for it: a day at a public garden in spring bloom, with you driving; a card good for one Saturday of heavy work, digging the new bed or spreading mulch, and then you show up; a good book about the flower they love most. If the flower lover on your list plans by the almanac, our old-timer’s Southern garden calendar for planting by the moon is a fair read before you pick that Saturday.

◆ From the Workshop: The sprig between the name and GARDEN is carved in the same pass as the letters, from the same board, so there is nothing glued on to work loose on a shed wall. Leaves are where a botanical design can go wrong, because real ones taper to a point and real stems are thin. Before a design goes to the machine we check it stroke by stroke, since a line thinner than about a tenth of an inch carves shallow and sands away, so every leaf and stem on this one is drawn heavy enough to hold up on the 16-inch board, where the sprig is about half the size it is on the 30-inch. Like the letters, it stays bare wood against the finish.

The Case for Gifts for Flower Lovers That Stay Up All Winter

Here is the thing about a flower person’s December. The beds are cut back and mulched, and the gardener is at the kitchen table with a stack of seed catalogs and a pencil, planning a garden that does not exist yet. Anything that only works in July spends the winter in a drawer. A gift for next spring lands now.

That is the case for the sign. It goes up on the shed, the garden gate, the back porch wall or over the potting bench in December, and when the first green shows in spring, the garden already has their name on it. It is the one gift here about the gardener rather than the gardening.

You type the name line on the product page, up to 14 characters, and watch it appear on the board in serif capitals beside the sprig and the word GARDEN: LINDA’S, NANA’S, THE PETERSONS’. The small line along the bottom takes up to 38 characters and carves the way you type it. A real person reads every order before anything meets the saw, spelling checked against what you typed.

Pick the size by where it hangs. The Small 16" x 3.5", at $30.00, sits over a potting bench or on a narrow shed door. The Medium 24" x 5.5" ($55) fits the side of a shed or a garden gate. The Large 30" x 7.25" ($80) is for the back porch wall, read from out in the beds. The greens of a garden flatter nearly all twenty finishes: Weathered Gray suits a gray shed, Barn Red a white one, and Dark Walnut or Ebony makes the bare-wood letters stand out the most.

We are a small Kentucky shop with 5,000+ customer reviews, and we carve this sign on a CNC machine in our shop, on one face of a solid board: pine for the stain finishes, poplar for the paints, never MDF. It comes with a sawtooth hanger installed and ships free in the U.S., and any two signs or wax melts earn up to 20% off at checkout, which helps when Mom and the neighbor with the best beds on the street both deserve one.

Roses, Zinnias or Mamaw’s Old Beds: A Line for Each Kind of Garden

The small line is where the sign becomes theirs. The sample, GROWN WITH LOVE AND A LITTLE DIRT, suits almost any flower person. For the rest, here are lines that fit the box, by the kind of garden they keep:

• THE VASES NEVER COME BACK: the cutting garden that supplies the church
• CUT AND COME AGAIN: for flowers that bloom harder the more you pick
• MIND THE THORNS, SMELL THE ROSES: the rose bed
• WILD ON PURPOSE: the patch the neighbors once mistook for neglect
• PASSED ALONG, NEVER BOUGHT: old-fashioned beds grown from cuttings traded over the fence
• SAME BEDS SINCE 1974: a grandmother’s garden, with the year hers went in
• PLANTED FOR THE BEES: the pollinator garden
• TALLER THAN THE FENCE BY JULY: the sunflower grower
• ZINNIAS BETWEEN THE TOMATOES: the vegetable patch that sneaks in flowers
• COFFEE FIRST, THEN THE WEEDS: the one out there at first light
• SMALL PORCH, BIG BLOOMS: when the whole garden is pots on the steps
• FIRST BEDS, SPRING 2027: a new house and a first garden, given at Christmas

Write your own line rather than borrowing a song lyric; the box is short, and the best lines sound like the yard. If they are a sunflower person through and through, our piece on why the sunflower became the flower of resilience is worth a read before you settle on the wording.

Who Should Get Seed and a Saturday of Digging Instead

The sign is the wrong gift for some flower people. Better to know that before you type a name in.

• They want a marker out in the bed. This is a wall sign with a sawtooth hanger, made for the shed, the porch wall or the potting bench. If they asked for something staked in the dirt by the roses, buy that.
• Every bloom they grow is on a windowsill. GARDEN is part of the carved design, not a line you type. For the houseplant keeper in a third-floor apartment, buy a good pot and save the sign for the year they get a yard.
• They are moving somewhere smaller. If she is giving away the good dishes and trading the yard for a patio, ask before adding to the walls. Our piece on 80th birthday gift ideas for mom when she is giving things away covers that season.
• They have named the one tool they want. If you have heard about one particular pruner three times since Labor Day, buy it.

For everybody else, the garden has been theirs for years; the sign just says so. If their favorite spot is really the porch or the kitchen rather than the beds, browse the rest of our personalized signs with one question in mind: where do they spend the first hour of a Saturday? Put the sign there.

The catalogs will be dog-eared by New Year’s either way. Type the name into our Personalized Garden Sign for the flower lover who grows better bouquets than the florist, try a small line or two until one sounds like their yard, and pick the finish by the color of the shed it will hang on.

Frequently Asked Questions

Christmas gift for someone who loves flowers?

A good Christmas gift for someone who loves flowers fits the gardener’s December, when the beds are bare and the seed catalogs are out: seed of a variety they keep circling, gloves that fit, a promised day at a garden in spring bloom, or their name on the garden, carved on a sign for the shed or porch wall. A gift aimed at next spring tends to land better than one more thing to keep alive indoors. Our Personalized Garden Sign carves their name and GARDEN with a leafy sprig between them, starting at $30.00, and it ships free in the U.S.

Unique gifts for flower lovers?

Unique gifts for flower lovers are the ones a gardener would never buy for themselves and nobody else on the street owns, such as their own name carved over the garden, a day at a public garden in full bloom with you driving, or a Saturday of hauling mulch done for them. Tools and seed are useful, but they are rarely unique, because serious gardeners pick their own. Our Personalized Garden Sign is carved to order in our Kentucky shop with the name and a small line you choose, so no two read alike.

What can you put on the personalized garden sign?

You type two lines on the personalized garden sign: the name line, up to 14 characters, set in serif capitals as LINDA’S or THE PETERSONS’, and a small line of up to 38 characters along the bottom, while GARDEN and the leafy sprig are part of the carved design. You watch the lines appear on the board as you type, and a real person reads every order before anything meets the saw, spelling checked against what you typed. Sizes run from the Small 16" x 3.5" at $30.00 to the Large 30" x 7.25" at $80, in 20 hand-applied finishes. It ships free in the U.S.: 2-7 business days in the shop, then 2-5 days to reach you.