Looking for a better way to preserve those beautiful flowers in your garden? Don’t you wish you could make them bloom longer for others to see and appreciate?

Well, it’s about time you gave them a drink. That’s the advice of a Cornell University horticulturist who said that hard liquor can preserve flowers.

William Miller, director of Cornell’s Flower Bulb Research Program, wasn’t drunk when he said this. In fact, his study has been published in HortTechnology, a peer-reviewed journal of horticulture.

Miller found that diluted alcohol – whiskey, vodka, gin or tequila – prevents the plant’s leaves and stem from growing but has no effect on the blossoms.

Because the plants are shorter, the flowers don’t tip over – a condition called the “bent neck” syndrome. Plants that were “watered” with alcohol produced blooms that remained upright longer.

“I’ve heard of using alcohol for lots of things but never for dwarfing plants,” said Charlie Nardozzi, a senior horticulturist with the National Gardening Association, a Vermont-based organization.

“It sounded weird when I first heard about it, but our members say it works. I’m going to try it just for curiosity,” he added.

Have you ever wondered why that lovely flower you’re holding smells good? Believe it or not, this is a natural mechanism that’s important to the plant’s survival.

We spray perfume on our bodies to smell good and attract members of the opposite sex. In a way, this is what flowers do.

Like humans, flowers need to reproduce or face extinction. They do this by producing pollen grains that need to reach other flowers. This is where pollination comes in.

Pollination is the process where pollen is transferred from one flower to another for the sexual reproduction of plants. This is accomplished in two different ways.

In abiotic pollination, pollination is done without the help of other organisms or pollinators. This is accomplished mostly by the wind (a process called anemophily) that carries the pollen to other plants. Another form of abiotic pollination is hydrophily or pollination by water which is common in aquatic plants.

Abiotic pollination occurs in only 20 percent of plants. Of that number, anemophily accounts for 98 percent of pollination while two percent is by hydrophily.