Last Spring my daughter and I were honored to be asked to put together a large-scale floral arrangement to be displayed at the pulpit of our church for an important meeting. We were given a modest budget and instructions that it would be on a shallow shelf, so the arrangement couldn’t be too deep. Other than that, we were pretty much on our own to design and put together whatever we chose.
I have really been loving the more natural garden-like trends I am seeing a lot in modern floral arrangements. I wanted to use garden roses and other large blooms in spring colors. I used to do flowers all of the time, but things have changed quite a bit in the last decade or so. I first had to find a place to get wholesale bunches of flowers that is open to the public. The guys at Arizona Flower Market were great to work with (This is not a sponsored post. I just wanted to share their info because I know others are looking for the same kind of business). They could’ve ordered what ever flowers I needed, if I had given them a little more time. As it was, we were able to select many beautiful varieties from the stock they had on hand. I love the floral cabbages and dahlias for the texture and garden feel they provided. I also love using hypericum berries and bells of ireland. Or course, we used roses (not technically garden variety–per our budget–but full heads that mix well with the garden feel) and the dark scabiosas provided just enough contrast in color and texture to bring our arrangement to life
This was my first time experimenting with this shape of arrangement, but I love how it turned out. The look we wanted was asymmetrical with kind of a lower center and more fullness on the sides. I kind of makes it look like the flowers are just spilling out of their container. I do use floral foam (oasis) so that I can have more control over where the flowers end up, but didn’t want this arrangement looking as stiff as a lot of the funeral sprays and such can end up looking.
Although we don’t want symmetry, we still want balance, so I mentally used a triangle type shape to help me position the line flowers–in this case Stock and Bells of Ireland, to give a little structure to our looser style arrangement.
We then positioned the largest flowers–the cabbages, then dahlias and roses–so that they would be balanced throughout the arrangement. Then filled in the gaps with the smaller flowers and berries.
It was so fun to get to work alongside my beautiful daughter and create a thing of beauty together. Do you have a favorite flower? Or a favorite trend in floral design?
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