Flowering Branches: Forcing Quince, Magnolia and Cherry Indoors

February in Washington is the hardest month to buy flowers for. The autumn material is finished, the spring crop is weeks away, and the imports are working hard and looking it. Branches are the answer, and they cost almost nothing.

Forcing is the practice of cutting dormant woody stems in late winter and bringing them indoors, where the warmth convinces them that spring has arrived and they flower weeks ahead of the plants outside. It is one of the few genuinely old techniques in floristry that still has no modern replacement.

When to cut

The plant has to have met its chilling requirement — a set number of hours below roughly 45°F — before it will respond to warmth. In this region that is satisfied by mid-January for most species. Cut before then and the branch will simply sit in the vase and do nothing.

The practical window is mid-January through mid-March, and the later you cut within it, the faster the branch responds, because the buds are already closer to breaking. A quince branch cut on 20 January may take three weeks. The same branch cut on 5 March may take five days.

What you are looking for is swollen buds. Run a thumb along the stem: dormant buds are hard, flat and tight against the wood; ready buds are noticeably plump and stand slightly proud. If they are hard, wait two weeks.

What forces well, and how fast

• Forsythia — one to two weeks. The easiest, the fastest, the most forgiving, and the most acid-yellow. Start here if you have never done it.
• Flowering quince (Chaenomeles) — two to three weeks. Coral, salmon, deep red or white on wonderfully gnarled, angular wood. The best of the group by a distance for design work, because the wood itself is the sculpture.
• Pussy willow — one week or less, and it does not need much convincing. Silver catkins, holds for a month, dries in place.
• Cherry and plum — three to four weeks. Delicate, short-lived once open, and the closest thing to the thing everyone in this city actually wants in March.
• Magnolia — four to six weeks, and worth every one of them. The furred grey buds are handsome before anything opens, so the branch is decorative for the whole wait.
• Dogwood — three to five weeks, and less reliable than the others. Redtwig dogwood is better used for its bare red stems, which need no forcing at all.
• Witch hazel — barely needs forcing; it flowers outdoors in January anyway. Spidery yellow-orange flowers and a genuinely lovely scent.

The method

1. Cut on a mild day, above freezing. Cutting frozen wood damages the tissue.
2. Cut long. Three to five feet is not excessive. Branches read as architecture, and a short branch reads as a twig.
3. Split the base. Make a two-inch vertical split up the cut end with secateurs, or crush it with a hammer. Woody stems have very little exposed surface for water uptake and this multiplies it. Do not shred it into pulp — a clean split is enough.
4. Soak overnight if you can. Lying the whole branch in a bathtub of cool water for a few hours rehydrates the bark and speeds everything up.
5. Warm water, cool bright room. Start them in lukewarm water in a bright spot, but not next to a radiator. Heat forces them faster and produces smaller, paler, shorter-lived flowers.
6. Change the water twice a week and recut the base if uptake slows.
7. Mist the buds in a dry heated house. This is the step that makes the difference between full flowers and buds that brown and abort.

Once the buds show real colour, move them somewhere cooler to slow them down and extend the display. Open branches hold five to ten days depending on species.

Where to cut from — and where not to

Take branches from your own garden, and take them as you would prune: from the interior, at a node, thinning rather than topping. A good forcing cut and a good pruning cut are the same cut.

Do not cut from the Tidal Basin. The Yoshino cherries there are federal property under the National Park Service, cutting or damaging them is an offence, and people are cited for it every spring. The same applies to street trees and park plantings across the District. If you want cherry branches, buy them from a grower — several mid-Atlantic farms cut and sell them specifically for this, and they are inexpensive.

Using them

Branches want a heavy vessel and very little else in it. The failure mode is a top-heavy arrangement in a light vase, going over at three in the morning. Use something ceramic and weighted, or ballast a glass vessel with stones.

Design-wise, three branches at different heights beats seven at the same height. Let the natural angles do the work rather than trying to correct them — a quince branch bent hard to the left is the reason you bought a quince branch.

They also mix well with almost nothing, which is the point: a bare vessel of forced quince with a single low bowl of Mixed Tulip beneath it is a complete winter table. If you would rather have the height without the four-week wait, our Sculptural Ceramic Vase is built for branch weight, and the Green World on Wood carries the same sculptural, woody register year-round.

Why it is worth doing

Forcing costs the price of a pair of secateurs and produces a five-foot arrangement in the month when a five-foot arrangement of anything else would cost several hundred dollars. It also does something no purchased flower does: it puts a slow, visible process in the room for three weeks, in the part of the year when nothing outside is moving at all.