With many different varieties and colours available, flower arrangements can brighten any space. They provide decorative and captivating sights to a landscape and increase wellbeing. Maintaining a cutting garden is a centuries-old pastime, but most of us aren’t exactly flower farmers and can’t spare the space to grow an abundance of blooms for arranging. Interior decorator Tamara Robbins Griffith shows you how to create stunning flower arrangements with local blooms and foliage from your own garden. 

Cutting
Periodic cutting of flowers can help your plants, kind of like deadheading. Try not to take too many from one plant. Be sure to cut them and put them in water right away. Cutting in the early morning is best, as the flowers have had the benefit of cool night air and morning dew. Their stems are filled with water and carbohydrates and so are firm to the touch. As the day warms up, flowers gradually dehydrate. Cutting midday is the worst time.

Vessel Options
Since I am creating very simple arrangements, I’ve sourced some really cool vases with impact from the store Black Rooster. I would say the same rule applies the other way as well. If you have a really complex arrangement with lots of different types of flowers and a lot of interest, it often works best in a simple vase.

Pure Foliage
We’re going to start with a classic foliage arrangement. If you open any décor magazine, you will see beautiful and lush arrangements of leaves — yes, leaves. Foliage is less expensive and easy to come by in nature, so you can make something really big and bold. Obviously this works well in a larger room, could be on a coffee table or a kitchen island. I’ve got some clippings from the Japanese maple and also from a Catalpa tree. And I’m using a taller, larger vase to create a very full display.

All in the Mix
Sometimes you don’t want to clip more than a few stems from a plant, so this is where you can get creative and mix a few types of blooms with some greenery to form a loose and slightly wild arrangement.

Modern Graphic Design
In a smaller bud vase, I love to take something simple and dramatic and use one large leaf and or bloom to make a statement. In this case, I’ve got a large head of hydrangea with a couple of hosta leaves. It’s pretty easy to toss together in under a minute, and if you need to ties it off, you can use a twist tie, some floral tape or even an elastic.