14-day tier

The long-keeping band. Fourteen days and beyond is a property of the stem, not of the care: low transpiration, dense vessels and low ethylene sensitivity. No recipe moves a stem into this band on its own.

Vase-life band 14 days Stems reaching this band 3 Stems that fall short 10

Stems reaching this band — 14 d
Stem profiles	5 d · days	7 d · days	10 d · days	14 d · days
Carnation Semi-woody · Slant 45° · Vase range 7–14 days · Water every 48h	5 days changes 2	7 days changes 3	10 days changes 5	14 days changes 7
Santini chrysanthemum Semi-woody · Slant 45° · Vase range 10–14 days · Water every 48h	5 days changes 2	7 days changes 3	10 days changes 5	14 days changes 7
Alstroemeria Semi-woody · Slant 45° · Vase range 7–14 days · Water every 24h	5 days changes 5	7 days changes 7	10 days changes 10	14 days changes 14

Stems that fall short

Delphinium
Delphinium is the archive's most ethylene-fragile stem and one of its two hollow-stemmed entries. It is also the tallest common cut flower, which means the air embolus has further to travel and the stem has further to bend.

Vase range 5–7 days
Water every 24h
Stock
Stock is the archive's water-fouling champion: a single bunch can turn a bucket cloudy in under 20 hours. It is also intensely fragrant and ethylene-sensitive, which makes it a stem that rewards a strict routine and punishes a casual one.

Vase range 5–7 days
Water every 24h
Sunflower
A sunflower drinks more water per day than any other stem in this archive — up to 150 mL for a single large head — and its milky sap feeds bacteria better than sugar water does. Both problems are addressed at the cut end.

Vase range 5–7 days
Water every 24h
Dahlia
Dahlia is the archive's shortest-lived garden stem and the one where the cut treatment matters most. Its stem is hollow and milky; a plain cut will have the flower nodding within 24 hours, while a seared cut adds two to three days.

Vase range 4–7 days
Water every 24h
Lisianthus
Lisianthus looks fragile and is not. What actually shortens its vase life in practice is cold storage: below 5 °C the petals darken and the stem stops taking up water permanently. Warm handling beats cold handling for this stem.

Vase range 7–10 days
Water every 24h
Hydrangea
Hydrangea is the archive's counter-intuitive entry: it is low on ethylene sensitivity yet collapses faster than almost anything else, because most of its water loss happens through the petals. The fix is sealing the stem, not cooling the room.

Vase range 5–10 days
Water every 24h
Gypsophila
Gypsophila is filed under the 'no treatment' cut class for a specific reason: its stems are wiry and brittle, and every common end treatment — crushing, splitting, searing — destroys more vessels than it opens. A plain sharp cut is the correct method.

Vase range 7–10 days
Water every 48h
Gerbera
A gerbera stem is a hollow tube about 4 mm across with a single ring of vessels. Air enters it instantly and irreversibly if the cut is made in air — which is why this is the one stem in the archive where cutting under water is mandatory rather than optional.

Vase range 5–7 days
Water every 24h
Tulip
The tulip is the archive's shortest-lived stem by design. Its 3–7 day window is not a failure of care — it is the plant finishing a programme it started in the bulb. Everything useful you can do happens in the first hour.

Vase range 3–7 days
Water every 24h
Garden rose
The garden rose is the archive's reference woody stem. Its 4/5 lignification rating means the vase is won or lost at the cut end, not at the petals — a blocked xylem here shows up as a nodding head roughly 36 hours before any petal symptom.

Vase range 5–7 days
Water every 24h

Vase-life ladder

Vase-life band 5 d The entry band. A stem that clears five days has been cut cleanly, hydrated within a minute and given clean water at least twice. Most soft-stemmed garden flowers live here. Vase-life band 7 d The working band. Reaching seven days requires a sugar source in the water and a biocide or a daily change. This is the band where the vase-solution recipes start to matter more than the cut. Vase-life band 10 d The keeping band. Stems here are either low-ethylene by nature or have a biocide-tolerant stem structure. Reaching ten days almost always means the water was changed on schedule rather than when it looked dirty. Vase-life band 14 d The long-keeping band. Fourteen days and beyond is a property of the stem, not of the care: low transpiration, dense vessels and low ethylene sensitivity. No recipe moves a stem into this band on its own.