Sending a bouquet of flowers to someone has long been associated with holidays and thank you’s, congratulations and well-wishes. Aside from cards and sweet chocolate confections, it’s the go-to accessory of gift giving, the gift that will never go out of style and the gift that women always appreciate, even after the flowers have long wilted. Ordering a bouquet is a lovely act, and watching the florist piece together a customized order – a yellow rose here, some chrysanthemum there – is art unto itself.

A new iPhone app called called iFlorist by ideas2mobile capitalizes on this gift-giving technique by sending e-card bouquets. With this app you become the Florist, designing your own bouquets, complete with vases and personal messages, to your friends – it’s a bit like a DIY card. For those times when you, for one reason or another, cannot buy a live bouquet, then iFlorist offers you the chance to send a digital likeness of one, one that probably takes just as much creative insight and loving time to create.

Soft piano jazz seemingly from KOIT radio station croons melodically in the background as you piece together a bouquet, choosing either to craft one together flower by flower, leaf by leaf, or by opting to choose amongst 12 prefabricated bouquet bunches to simply send one away quickly. An object bar runs along the top, giving categories of flowers, greens, bouquets, vases, backgrounds, text, and photo, to start you off in the right direction. A navigation bar along the bottom allows you to save a project, start a new one, reverse images to their mirror image, and rotate objects either clockwise or counterclockwise.

Picking a vase is a good way to start, because it gives you an idea of what the theme of the bouquet should be – unless, of course, you like to break all the rules and just concoct a haberdashery of flowers in all colors and hues. Should you just want a quick prefabricated bouquet, select the bouquet option under the objects tab and choose among 12 different, readymade bouquets, ranging from spherical and tulip dominated to the tall reaching and avant-garde bouquet rife with birds of paradise and the odd garland or two. Otherwise, when customizing your own, do so with caution: it’s actually fairly difficult to piece together a bouquet from scratch, just as I’m sure it’s no small feat to put together one in life. Try not to have many flowers out at once, because you’ll end up with a mess of overlapping objects that will become increasingly difficult to sort from foreground to background since tapping an item will bring it to the front of all the others.

To use a specific flower or leaf, tap its picture and the item will pop up in the center of the screen. Tap once to select an object and move it around, and hold to delete it (touch lightly when deleting otherwise you’ll be frustrated from moving around the object too much for a delete prompt to register). Every time you select a flower the name will show up in English and Latin on the top of the screen, but you can turn this ability off if for some reason you like your flowers to remain anonymous. When placing objects down, make sure you tap the vase or any other object (flower, greenery) behind it if you want them to be placed in the forefront, otherwise your bouquet may suffer from exposed stems that should be hidden within the vase. Use the buttons on the bottom right of the screen to rotate your flowers or leaves so you may have flowers at different angles rather than have a very dull, uninspired bouquet of stagnantly placed, superimposed images of the same flower. Once again, it can be frustrating in the later stages of bouquet building when you ruin the order of your objects with accidental, misguided tapping, so construct your customized bouquet one object at a time.

To make for a well-rounded e-card, iFlorist offers a choice in backgrounds, ranging from the soft, single colors of whitewashed pink and dark mauve, to the more overwhelming backdrops of sunset, clouds, and even a headache-inducing blurry image of what could very well be a thicket of brush or just as easily an up close microscope image of a Boston Terrier’s fur. A few backgrounds are cute and well done – the vivid green background with white, silhouetted butterflies comes to mind, and I found it paired well with the vintage vase and bouquet of wildflowers I concocted.

There are a fair amount of flowers and greenery to choose from in iFlorist. The greens consists of various ferns, some bilberry, mastic, ivy, palm, the very southern sounding goatwillow, and the relatively hard to pronounce araliaivy. The flowers include three colors of roses, four colors of tulip, some generic filler flowers like gerberas poppies and carnations, the beautiful flamingo flower, the before unknown to me prairiegentian, sweet buttercups, and then the more dramatic forsynthia, hydrangea, and, my favorite, the bird of paradise. All of the flower images in iFlorist were contributed by Max Schulz, a photographer, I assume, based on his beautiful, if sparse, website that embraces that white palette void akin to museum galleries many an artist likes to employ for starkness purposes.

Once you’ve crafted your beautiful bouquet – I was fairly proud of my Gothic Overture, as I labeled it to my friends, complete with dark purples, reds, and blacks – iFlorist gives you to the option to send it through email, and will even import any events in your iPhone address book to remind you of any upcoming event that could benefit from a gift of digital bouquets. You can easily select any address from your address book or add a new one when emailing, and iFlorist will send an email notification that your email has been saved.

While digital bouquets may not carry the tangible beauty and blooming smell of freshly cut flowers, iFlorist bouquets will never wilt, and the gift of a truly customizable card is always something to be appreciated. The developer eventually would like to include the option of ordering live versions of your customized bouquets, which would greatly add to the app, making it into something truly unique. Until then, if you avoid the Boston Terrier fur and the unidentifiable neon orange back backgrounds, iFlorist has much to offer, and has proven to be quite efficient, easily operated, and enjoyable.