How to Make a Great Bouquet.

How do you make a great bouquet?

Yes a handful of focal flowers like dahlias or sunflowers can make an easy bouquet, but if you want some depth and a little more advanced, I have some tips for you.

1. It looks best to work in odd numbers, like 3 stems or 5 stems, instead of even stems. I always try to have 3 big focal flowers in my bouquets.

2. Next a filler flower can fill in the holes between the main focals and add a nice background. Examples of filler flowers are feverfew, statice and yarrow.

3. For more depth in a bouquet, I like to add a line flower or spike. Examples of these would be celosia, delphinium or snapdragons. And again, I like to use 3 to 5 per bouquet of these. If you use 2, it can often look like bunny ears.

4. If you make a bouquet and it just seems sparse, adding foliage is a great trick to beef up your bouquet. I love to add the foliage last because it acts as a collar around the outside and makes the flowers pop.

5. Color is important too. If can be fun to choose all the colors because it’s hard to decide what you like best, but the bouquet can end up feeling chaotic. I would recommend choosing colors that are similar, which is called a monochromatic bouquet- like 3 shades of purples, or 2 shades of oranges. Or you can add opposite colors, like purple and yellow or purple and orange.

6. My last tip is how you put your bouquet together. Try not to smash the stems together in a straight up and down line- it will cause your bouquet to look smaller and not show each flower as well. Instead try the spiral method. Hold the first 2 stems crossing each other. Each stem you add after, add at a 45 degree angle and spin a ¼ turn. It will make your bouquet much fuller and the flowers less smashed.

7. And a bonus tip! The vase your choose matters! You can have a great bouquet, but if the lip of the vase is too wide, the flowers will splay out and look disappointing. Instead choose a vase with a narrower top, or cut your stems shorter can help too.

   1. A sample recipe:

      3 Dahlias (focal)

      3 Celosia (spike)

      3 Statice (filler)

      3 Eucalyptus (foliage)

      Good luck! I hope you have time to experiment with flowers. You will get better each time-it just takes practice.