Q. In your article about patriotic blue gingers, you mentioned "butterflying" the leaves. What do you mean? Why and how do you flower arrangers do this? And what is meant by deep-water soak?

A. Butterflying the leaf is something I learned from May Moir, the late, great gardener and flower-arranger extraordinaire. There are some tricks of the trade to cutting gingers and other tropicals for an arrangement or decoration — butterflying the leaf is one of them.

You butterfly the leaves of ginger for several akamai reasons. You want to cut off some of the leaves so the flower stalk looks more attractive. You cut off ugly, dead, wind-tattered parts of the leaf.

Ginger leaves will wilt once the stalk is cut. To minimize moisture loss, cut off some of the leaf right away. Old-time recycler-type gardeners finely chop up these bits of leaf and stalk and put them around the ginger patch for mulch. Some florist-trained arrangers will cut all the leaves cleanly off the stalk. This is one way to do it.

You can also get your nice clean sharp clippers or pruner and cut about two-thirds of the leaf off. Make a diagonal cut by the midrib and shred off the leaf so it has a pretty pattern. Do this to all of the cut flower stalks. If you are an efficient gardener, you can line up several leaf stalks with leaves aligned together and cut them all at one time. You can play with different patterns and come up with the prettiest or most striking cut pattern for your arrangement. I usually do the simple one that Moir taught me.

Deep-water soaking is another Moir tool for flower arranging. Like us, cut flowers need water. The better you soak and clean them at the start, the longer they will last in a flower arrangement.

Get a bucket or clean garbage can and set it in a shady place. Fill it with cool water. Then get your nice sharp garden pruners and cut the gingers. As you are butterflying the leaves, and cleaning up the flower and leaf stalk, as soon as you can, immerse the flower stalk in the bucket of cool, fresh water. Clean off the flowers, rinse away any pests. Without their roots the ginger will quickly wilt if it doesn't get water. Soak for at least an hour and then make your arrangement, or take the flowers as a hostess gift (make sure the hostess has a vase big enough for your garden gifts).

There is another reason to butterfly your ginger leaves. Sometimes the ginger gets too thick and crowded. Especially when it's really wet — like during our 43 days of continuous rain earlier this year.

My gingers went nuts in the "monsoon of '06" and some of the more aggressive ones, such as the red, are crowding out choice ones like the "Mr. Pang from Wahiawa orange" one that everyone wants a rhizome of.

The very tough red ginger is also getting too big. (Few people have a vase that is sturdy and heavy enough for an 8- to 10-foot tall handsome red ginger.) I fertilized the patch once when my friends Lynne and Michael got married back in 2001, and since then, I have used only mulch on the patch.

I butterfly the leaves of the aggressive reds to let more sun in for the others. I trim them to better see the choice views from my kitchen window (and I leave lots of bushy leaves to hide some of the views I'd rather not see). If you trim the leaves as they are growing up, it makes for a shorter ginger stalk and more light and air circulation for the rest of the patch. The cut leaves make excellent soil enriching and water-saving weed-preventing mulch.

Heidi Bornhorst is a sustainable-landscape consultant. Submit questions at islandlife@honoluluadvertiser.com or Island Life, The Advertiser, P.O. Box 3110, Honolulu, HI 96802. Letters may be published or distributed in print, electronic or other forms.