Easter and Passover Flowers: Two Spring Tables, Different Rules

Easter and Passover fall within days of each other most years and are treated, floristically, as if they were the same holiday. They are not. One has a strong and specific flower tradition; the other has almost none, plus a set of practical constraints that most florists have never been told about.

Easter

The traditional flower is the Easter lily, Lilium longiflorum — the white trumpet lily, forced by growers to hit a date that moves by up to five weeks a year, which is one of the more demanding pieces of horticulture in the industry.

It carries real symbolic weight in church decoration, and for a church, an altar, or a household that keeps the tradition, it is unambiguously the right flower. For a dinner table it has two problems that are worth naming.

• The scent is enormous. A single stem will dominate a dining room, and over a long meal a lot of people find it overwhelming rather than pleasant. In a small DC dining room it is genuinely too much.
• Lily pollen is toxic to cats — seriously so. Lilium and Hemerocallis species cause acute kidney failure in cats, and the dose required is very small: pollen groomed off fur is enough. This is not a mild-stomach-upset warning. A household with a cat should not receive lilies at all, and no amount of removing the anthers makes it safe.

If the tradition matters and the household has a cat, the honest answer is white tulips, white ranunculus or white hydrangea instead — The Classic White or White Hydrangea both carry the register without the risk, and Pet-Friendly Blush Garden is built for exactly this problem.

Beyond lilies, the Easter palette is spring bulbs and pastels: tulip, daffodil, hyacinth, ranunculus, muscari, spray rose in blush and cream. Pastel Rainbow Arrangement and Romantic Pastels Arrangement are the straightforward choices. Hyacinth is worth a warning of its own — one pot scents an entire floor, and it is a love-it-or-hate-it fragrance.

Passover

Here is the thing almost nobody outside the community knows: there is no traditional Passover flower. Unlike Rosh Hashanah, where the table has its own visual conventions, Passover's symbolism is entirely on the seder plate. Flowers are welcome, they are simply not prescribed.

That makes them a genuinely good gift — an unfreighted, generous thing to bring a host — provided a few practical points are respected.

• Send them before the holiday begins, not during. The first two evenings are the seders, and in observant households the first and last days are full festival days on which deliveries are not received. Flowers arriving on the afternoon of the first seder are also arriving in the middle of the single busiest cooking day of the Jewish year. Aim for the day before.
• Keep them low. A seder is a long meal built around conversation and a shared text at the table. A tall centrepiece blocks sightlines for three or four hours. Under six inches, or off the table entirely.
• Keep the scent modest. The meal has its own strong aromas — horseradish, roasted egg, wine — and a heavily fragrant arrangement fights all of them.
• Avoid decorative wheat, oats, barley and rye. This is the one people miss. Those five grains are chametz, and a household that has spent a week removing every trace of them from the kitchen does not want a decorative wheat sheaf on the table. Wheat and grasses are fashionable in contemporary arrangements, which makes this a live risk rather than a theoretical one.
• A potted plant is a good alternative and, unlike cut flowers, is still there when the eight days end.

Spring flowers in white, green, blush and soft yellow suit the table well. Our Ivory and Cream Elegance and Soft Ritual both sit under sightline height — or specify height directly through the Designer Flower Mix, which is the reliable way to get a genuinely low arrangement rather than a tall one in a short vase.

Orthodox Easter

Worth flagging separately, because the DC region has substantial Russian, Ukrainian, Greek, Ethiopian and Serbian communities and Orthodox Pascha usually falls on a different Sunday from Western Easter — sometimes by a week, sometimes by more than a month.

Two things to get right. First, check the date; assuming it coincides is the standard error. Second, in Slavic tradition, cut flowers are given in odd numbers — even numbers are for funerals and cemetery visits. A dozen roses is precisely the wrong count. Send eleven, or thirteen, or seven. Our standard dozen counts can be adjusted on request, and it is worth asking.

The overlap week

Practically, Easter weekend and Passover week are one continuous delivery surge in this region, sitting immediately after the cherry blossom festival. Order three to four days ahead. Lilies in particular sell out — they are a forced crop grown to a date, and when the allocation is gone there is no second harvest.

And if you are unsure which holiday a household keeps, or whether they keep one at all: spring flowers, low, unscented, sent the day before, are correct in every case. That is not a hedge. That is the actual best answer.