Dad's Mini Lesson - Floral Arrangement
Flower Power
The holidays are over and you know what that means: time to head back to school.
Let’s start off light with a mini lesson, shall we?
I asked my wife, Kayla if she’d agree to give us a quick tutorial on flower arrangement. She has a real eye for these artistic compositions; quite often she pulls together bouquets for our home on the fly, and she does this VERY inexpensively, which is a nice idea to take into the new year. Many of us are probably on a budget, am I right???? THE ECONOMY!
We walked over to our local Trader Joe’s back in December to pick up an assortment for this project, but you can truly grab flowers anywhere you like. TJ’s has a good selection with prices that are kind of hard to beat. Here is a fact that we both learned before our wedding: lots of florists pop into Trader Joes as soon as they open and go wild on the floral displays. That’s right! They’re buying their stuff from the same place you can get it!
Generally speaking, TJ’s offers a lot of seasonal fare. That means if it’s autumn, you’ll get more reds and oranges and golds. If it’s spring, the hues will lean more pink and purple and Easter-Eggy. Reds and greens for the holidays, and so on, etc. There are always greenery and white options, however, and that’s what Kayla usually goes with for our household.
For this lesson, Kayla made two different arrangements with an assortment of green and white flowers. Flowers on a budget, she jokes, but essentially she’s making something that she calls “an every day arrangement,” which is just the kind of bouquet that you’d set out around the house for a fresh look.
Her go-to for these arrangements is heavy on greenery - what folks might call “filler” - such as baby’s breath, and because we’re in Florida, fun tropical greenery like palm fronds, ferns, and eucalyptus (which you can dry and keep around for longer).
Kayla always throws out the “flower food” that comes with these pre-selected bundles of flowers (the same ones that come in mixed bouquets you might buy anywhere). She says she read that actual florists say these are bad for the flowers and wind up killing them faster; you’re better off just trimming the stems yourself and keeping them in fresh water, changing it out every so often when it gets cloudy.
If you take all of the flowers and greenery and arrange them on a flat surface (here we use our stove, but a table or the counter would also be fine), then you can then take everything and try out some different styles in your vases or whatever you decide to use.
We picked up some white roses to go with our greenery (the big garden white roses and some smaller ones, too), and one of the reasons we picked these (even though they can be a little more expensive than other flowers) is that they are non-toxic to pets. Some other flowers that might look pretty - like lilies, for example - are highly toxic to cats. It’s good to look ahead of time and figure that out before you buy anything, especially if your pets have been known to want to chomp a little veggie snack!
You want to cut the stems with a super sharp blade, cutting them at an angle. Kayla also trims off plenty of the leaves from the side of the rose stems so they don’t all lodge at the lip of the vase. You can keep some for aesthetic reasons, but the less leaves you have cluttering the mouth of the vase, the less likely they’ll be to die and create mildew and decay in the water. Once one thing starts to rot, it’s all downhill from there. Try to keep air circulating.
One trick to get flowers to last longer: consider buying flowers that are less open. Spray roses are nice for this, and they cost less that actual roses.
Kayla likes bouquets that have a wilder look; something you might collect by the handful outside in the swampy greenery of Florida, perhaps.
She initially got into flower arrangement when we moved together to Miami (we’d come straight from my writing residency in Las Vegas; it was her first time living in Florida). Down the street from our condo was a little cart that sold tons of beautiful fresh flowers and greenery at reasonable prices, and during the pandemic, Kayla really enjoyed walking down there, buying the flowers, and then making those arrangements for our home. It gave a touch of beauty to our space, which made it feel significantly more homey and lived-in. It also allowed her to be creative and to try something new.
Kayla doesn’t claim to be a master florist. She’s self taught and tries out what she thinks she’ll like. She’s also not afraid to switch things up, which means if she doesn’t get what she wants the first time, she’ll just pull everything out and try all over again. It’s not a science. You can make mistakes!
If you’re in a rush, Kayla says that you can make a bouquet very quickly for under twenty dollars simply by stopping at a store and picking up a pack of assorted florals and a pack of assorted greenery, then mixing them together on your own, placing them in whatever vase you’d like to hold them.
You can genuinely use any type of jar to put your arrangement in, as long as it is wide and deep enough to hold both water and the stems of your plants. That means you could essentially use an empty spaghetti sauce jar. Thrifty!!!!
For our Trader Joe’s floral trip, we picked up four bundles - two different sets of greenery, two different sets of white roses - and probably spent closer to thirty bucks, but most of that was spent on the roses (if we’d gone daisies or other smaller white wild flowers, the price would have decreased significantly). If you price things out, it’s possible to put together a very nice bouquet for very little cash.
Here’s what I will say: you won’t find a bouquet like this for fifteen bucks - probably not even, twenty! Making your own means that you get to have something unique (and also something that would cost you A LOT more money if you bought it from a florist).
Key takeaways, according to Kayla:
Get a nice, clean chop on the stem. Don’t put anything into your receptacle that hasn’t been freshly cut.
Fresh, clean water - but not too much! A few inches at the bottom will suffice, as long as it reaches the bottom of your cut stems. Replace it often.
Skip the flower food!
If you want to do less in the vase and have more control before putting them into the water, trying laying them out flat while you arrange, then pick them up in and rotate the bundle, see what it will look like standing up in the vase and arrange from your hand.
Be creative and let yourself have fun with the placement. It should reflect your temperament and your taste; worry less about trying to emulate a specific style.
Kayla called this “the Florida wildlife bouquet,” because it’s got roses in it, yes, but they’re surrounded by a swamp of fresh and juicy greens.
This bouquet lived on our dining room table through the Christmas season. We changed out the water, plucked out anything that was dying, and it lived on nicely for several weeks. That’s a lot of bang for your buck.
Thanks for bearing with me over that long holiday break! I got the dreaded bug that’s been going around pretty much immediately after new years, so I’ve been out of commission, but now I’m back in action!
This week, I’ll be at Key West Literary Seminar - theme is FAMILY, which I love - so instead of our regularly scheduled “lesson” with a smart friend, I’ll be posting a breezy tutorial on Key West and Florida fun stuff, which I think you’ll all enjoy.
Next week, we’ll be back to all our regularly scheduled content, including a mini lesson on making pickles (including a recipe!!!!) and a long awaited guitar lesson with my wonderful pal Ryan Rivas, whose substack DISPATCHES FROM COLONIALTOWN is one of my genuine Orlando favorites. Last week, his piece on Central Florida segregated swimming pools blew my mind. You need to read it!!!!
New year, new lessons! Make sure you upgrade to paid to you don’t miss any of the excellent content.
As always -
Love,
Dad