Flower arranging
Who hasn’t tried to arrange an artistic bouquet of flowers, only to find that the end result is just an untidy boring bunch? But with a few simple tips, it’s possible to add a touch of artistry to floral decorations. There is a basic structure that is more or less the same, whichever flower arrangement you wish to display. It is simply a matter of using some fundamental artistic principles of design, such as balance, colour, contrast, emphasis, harmony and proportion.
An arrangement must have good proportion and visual balance, achieved by grouping and graduating flowers and foliage and avoiding lopsidedness by counterbalancing large blooms with two or more smaller ones. A clear emphasis should be set, a focal point from which all other plants seem to stem. This can also be emphasized using strong colours in the centre of the display and contrasting paler colours around the outer edges, further enhanced by the use of texture, with coarser foliage in the centre and finer at the edges. To achieve this you will probably need floral foam to keep the various flowers and foliage in place.
Here’s a simple example for a front-facing arrangement perhaps placed on a sideboard.
Take a suitable, fairly shallow container and fit it with floral foam which has been soaked in water. Take an uneven number, say five, of larger flowers with stiff stems (or use wire) and put one standing upright in the centre at the back, then each of the other four, facing forward and successively shorter below the first, the last one at container level. Add foliage to provide a basic upright semi-oval shape. Then add an uneven number of flowers with the blooms showing in the top right area and the same type and number showing in the bottom left area. Do the same with contrasting flowers of similar size at top left and bottom right. Now fill any gaps with carefully placed foliage. You should now have an arrangement with five large flowers rising from bottom centre to top centre of the display and a cluster of smaller flowers spreading diagonally from top left to bottom right and a cluster of similar sized flowers spreading diagonally from top right to bottom left, all enhanced with green foliage.Voila!
