How to Arrange Flowers in a Vase at Home
Having cut flowers in your home brings freshness and life from the outside in. Picking up some flowers on your food shop or taking cuttings from your garden or allotment can open up the opportunity of beautiful flowers in a vase on your kitchen table on a regular basis. Putting flowers in a vase is also a great opportunity to reignite your creative skills. It’s always satisfying to rediscover your flare for design when it’s been lying dormant since your cutting and glueing years in infant school. Below I've written some steps to follow to help you arrange flowers from your garden in a vase.
Photo by @Livibphotography
Being able to arrange flowers in a vase is a great skill to have to help you spruce up any flowers you’ve been given or ones you’ve picked up reduced at the shops. By giving the stems a reshuffle and adding a few extra leaves and seed heads, you can make them look worth so much more with your own creative hands.
It’s always good to start with leaves. Adding foliage to a bouquet spaces the flowers apart and makes the arrangement a lot more juicy. Start by cutting stems of foliage from your garden (olive leaves, shrubbery, herbs like rosemary mint and sage, eucalyptus, and ivy all work well). Take off the lower leaves so that no greenery is below the water line. Add lots of foliage to your vase, in my opinion, the more foliage you use the better. You can add height and texture and depth with different shades of green. Herbs also provide the added bonus of scent. These stems will now act as a framework for you to slide your flowers into and will make the flower arranging part a lot easier.
Photo by Sophie Carefull
Now start by adding any longer and feathery shaped flowers. Keep the length on these and use them to extend the eye outwards from the arrangement. From your garden you could use flowers like salvia, flowering mint, dried or fresh grasses, larkspur and stocks. All of these have a beautiful shape that will extend your arrangement outwards, making it look a lot bigger.
Next add any larger flowers you have. They add rhythm and blocks of colour to your vase arrangement. Keep taking off any leaves that sit below the water line. Any leaves under the water will go slimey and make the water murky, which means the flowers won’t last as long. Flowers from your garden that’ll be perfect for adding blocks of colour are roses, hydrangeas, ranunculus, peonies, flowering dill and fennel, and sunflowers. Space these apart so they bring colour across the display.
Photo by Sophie Carefull
Finally, pop in any flowers that are smaller. These will add little spatterings of colour and connect the whole bouquet together. Flowers you could find in your garden to do this job are blackberries (watch out for thorns!), poppy seed heads, viburnum, any little flowers on garden shrubs, sweetpeas, nigella flowers or seed heads.
Now you can sit back and be proud of your vase arrangement. It may sound a bit woo, but the more relaxed you are when putting flowers together, the better they look. Each time you practice, the more confidence and enjoyment you’ll get from it. To keep your flowers lasting longer, change the water every couple of days. Re-cutting the stems when you do this also extends the vase life of your flowers.
I’d love to see how you get on! Tag me @WebbandFarrer in your Instagram photos.
Keep any eye out on the blog for a ‘how to’ video in September, where I’ll show you how to develop your vase arrangement skills even further.
Alex x
Want to learn more about flower arranging?
You can find out how to arrange flowers in a vase and create a handtie bouquet in my online flower workshops. Learn at home where you know the tea’s good.