Home and Garden Repairs

A bouquet of artfully arranged flowers is the all-time classic of Valentine's Day gifts, and having them delivered to your beau's home or workplace by flower delivery services can add that extra touch of thoughtfulness and luxury. However, your flowers aren't likely to go over so well if your chosen blooms send the love of your life into a fit of sneezing and coughing, and buying flower arrangements for hay fever sufferers takes some careful thought and planning.

Fortunately, there are a wide variety of flowers that produce beautiful blooms without irritating the throat and nasal passages of allergy sufferers, and your choices are far from limited. To help steer you in the right direction, keep the following guidelines in mind when ordering flower arrangements for your allergy-suffering spouse, partner or romantic prospect:

Roses are (usually) fine

A bouquet of roses screams romanticism like no other flower on earth, and the good news is that these iconic flowers actually produce very little in the way of airborne pollen. However, even this tiny amount of allergenic pollen can produce adverse reactions in particularly sensitive sufferers. Choosing slightly less mature roses with tighter buds will reduce the airborne pollen count still further, and will also ensure that the roses remain beautiful long after Valentine's Day is over.

Choose insect-pollinated flowers

Roses are a good choice of flower for hay fever sufferers because of the way they spread their pollen; instead of releasing it into the air, they deposit it on the bodies of nectar-drinking insects such as honeybees and butterflies. The pollen they produce is naturally sticky as a result, and is very unlikely to disperse into the air where it can irritate the sinuses of allergy sufferers.

However, roses aren't the only insect-pollinated flower ideally suited for Valentine's Day arrangements, and you have a number of other options to choose from if you wish to diversify the flowers in your bouquet, or simply find roses a little too cliched. The following flowers are all excellent choices that reach their peak during the late winter/early spring season:

• Peonies
• Hydrangeas
• Impatiens (also known as 'Busy Lizzies'')
• Gladioli
• Most varieties of orchid
• Geraniums

Consider pollen-free flowers for sensitive sufferers

If the object of your affections is particularly sensitive to pollen, even these hypoallergenic, insect-pollinated choices may provoke adverse reactions and ruin what should be the most romantic day of the year. However, flowers are still a viable option even in these cases, as many flower delivery services stock a range of sterile flowers which have been selectively bred to produce no pollen at all. Pollen-free lilies are an especially popular and beautiful choice, and are stocked by a wide variety of flower arrangement delivery services.