As a writer, photographer, and blogger for online gardening and flower arranging media, I often share flower arranging tutorials and tips! I hope you find some of them useful!
How to Turn Your Love of Flowers into a Floral Design Career
Do you ever dream of spending your days surrounded by stems of garden roses and lilacs? Gathering and composing arrangements of colorful, fragrant blossoms day after day, instead of sitting behind a desk? Owning a flower shop is one of those romantic jobs many people dream of. But what is it really like? And how do you get started with a career in floral design?
Rethinking Jasmine: The Perfect Vase for a Fragrant Flowering Vine
A member of the olive family, jasmine vines bloom from spring to summer with a strong fragrance and vines that like to cling to walls and trellises. J. officinale, or common jasmine, is my personal favorite with almost-red buds that fade to pink. The vine is deciduous, but if you continue picking the flowers throughout the spring and summer, it will go on providing flowers for you.
To add a touch of texture and fragrance to bouquets, consider adding some redolent herbs to your bouquets. They tend to last well and make inexpensive fillers for bouquets, and the best part is, you can repurpose them for cooking later!
Read on to discover 10 herbs that will hold up particularly well in your herb flower arrangements once cut.
Rethinking Honeysuckle: Casual Vines for Charming Arrangements
The casual personality of honeysuckle flowers and vines is ideal for making bouquets at home. Unless you live at Buckingham Palace, flowers are an accessory, not an art piece. Stiff arrangements with each stem coerced into place are beautiful at an event, but at home flowers should appear a little less thought out. I love for my bouquets to appear as if they were simply plucked from the meadow behind my house (even if sometimes it takes much more thought and effort than that)
Wild Violets: Rethinking Eliza Doolittle’s Favorite Flower
Perhaps you consider violets a weed, if you’ve ever had them take over your lawn or garden, but sweet violets used to be a mainstay of the floral industry. From the 1800s into the 1930s and ’40s, florists would grow their own violets in greenhouses attached to their shops. Violet sellers sold the little bundles on the street (think: Eliza Doolittle).
Olive Branches: Rethinking an Underappreciated Symbol of Peace
Olive trees are common in Mediterranean climates where olives and their oil are a mainstay of the cuisine. But the leaves and branches have also been used throughout history for different purposes. The ancient Greeks wove the leaves into crowns for Olympic prizes and the branches and oil were used in religious rituals and offerings.