I was so inspired by Holly Becker’s post on Decor8 last week that I bought some flowers for the house this weekend. My little hangup is I feel like the house needs to be clean if I’m going to invest in fresh flowers, so I had a fabulous Saturday evening of housecleaning while Dave recovered from minor surgery. I bought some tulips, because all this rain is making me long for spring, and another flower that I don’t know the name of, but which looks like a muscular heather. Anybody know what it’s called? When I put the tulips in the vase they were a little too droopy, so I tried the old trick of dropping a penny in the water. Within an hour, they were standing straight up. I googled and wikipedia’d the phenomenon trying to figure out why this works so well, but the only straight answer I could come up with is that the oxidation of the penny reduces algae growth in the water. That doesn’t seem like the right answer. So it remains a mystery, but if you ever want to get your tulip stems to stand at attention, try a penny.
