Flower Arranging Tips and Tricks
While there are many reasons to grow flowers, arranging them into a bouquet can be one of the most delightful. Cutting flowers is also important to encourage the plant to produce more blooms, which is good for you and the beneficial insects. Whether you have your own garden or enjoy cutting flowers as part of your weekly Garden City Harvest CSA veggie share, here are some tips and tricks to make a beautiful bouquet.
Buttercups from a nearby ditch and perennial lambs ear provide unusual and beautiful bouquet material. Photo and arrangement by Emily Kern Swaffar, Harvestscapes Design LLC.
Also, if you’re looking for flowers for your next special event, Garden City Harvest offers u-pick flowers by the bucketful. Click here for pricing and more information.
Guiding principles
It might feel hard to cut a beautiful flower, but keep in mind it’s a good thing because it promotes even more blooms and ensures blooms over a longer period of time.
If possible, it’s best to cut flowers in the morning when it is cooler outside.
Put the cut blooms in water asap.
Don’t be afraid to incorporate unusual plant material or color combinations. Varying colors, as well as leaf and flower textures and shapes, can create the most eye-catching bouquets.
Cutting and arranging
Cut the flower stem at an angle and at a node along stem. A node is where a side shoot or leaf intersects with the stem.
Try for the longest stem BUT try not to cut off buds/side shoots of future flowers.
Remove all the lower leaves. Leaves that sit in water in your vase will start to stink and shorten the life span of your bouquet.
After cutting flowers to your heart’s content, bring them back inside or to a work table to recut the stems and arrange in your vase to your liking.
If your blooms are wilting, often cutting an inch or two off the stems can refresh the blooms.
Place bouquet in fresh clean water. A co-worker told me that you should never put your flowers in water that you wouldn’t drink.
Design principles
Focus on balance over symmetry. Photo and arrangement by Emily Kern Swaffar, Harvestscapes Design LLC.
Focus on balance over symmetry. Balance refers to elements in a bouquet or any work of art having equal visual weight (i.e. how much something catches and holds your eye). While it’s good to have eye catching, you don’t want your eye to get stuck on one thing. You want your focus to move around the bouquet. Balance can be achieved with size, complexity, shape, color or density, and can often be an intuitive feeling that becomes more natural the more you do it.
Repetitive elements create balance and harmony. Repeating a color or flower or texture will tie the bouquet together.
Tall in back and shorter in front, or taller in the middle and shorter around the outside. It often helps to choose a good side or face of the arrangement.
Match size of vase to size of bouquet. Often if your bouquet doesn’t look right, it’s not you! (Or the flowers). It’s probably the vase size that’s off. The flowers should be at least the height of the vase if not taller. And if things look loose or disheveled in a bad way (sometimes that could be the look you’re going for…), try cutting the stems shorter and sticking them in a shorter vase or a vase with a narrower mouth.
For a video tutorial and more on cutting flowers, check out this blog: How to Cut Flowers with Farmer Caroline.