Aloha ageratum!

A flower that we don't use very often in the posies is ageratum, sometimes called 'floss flower'. We grow it as an outdoor annual and have had better luck than usual with it this year - often it just comes up too short! We have learnt to avoid the most common 'Hawaii' variety in favour of longer-stemmed varieties. As we're at the very tail end of the season, the ones used this week are grown indoors from a grower in Cornwall. 

They have a bright bluey-purple colour and a fluffy head which is useful to add dots of colour and texture to an arrangement. You can also find pink, white and two-tone varieties. They are a tropical or warm temperate flower, native to Mexico and Central America, where they are commonly called 'whiteweed'.

They don't exactly have a fragrance but they do have a distinctive smell. The smell takes me straight back to when I was a florist in New Zealand twenty-five years ago because we used them quite a bit and you can really smell them when the warm sun is shining on them (not much chance of that here in November!).