Add beauty to the world with these tips for arranging flowers

Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, and with its approach, we wanted to know: how can we create beautiful flower arrangements? We talked with a few local experts about their tips and tricks for creating eye-catching bouquets sure to wow the recipient and/or add beauty to your home. We hope these ideas help you create something lovely and meaningful.

1. Incorporate different textures.

Dana McDowell, owner of C L E M E N T I N E in Cape Girardeau, learned about the foraging bohemian flower world from her flower mentor while living in Anchorage, Alaska, for approximately three years with her husband in the Army. When they came back to Cape Girardeau, she noticed no one else was creating foraged arrangements like the ones in Alaska, and she decided to fill the void. In 2016, she opened her business out of her home.

She describes her floristry style as “a little bit wild,” organic and overgrown, inspired by cottage gardens. She enjoys foraging and incorporates plants at each stage of their life cycle in her arrangements, including when they are budding, blooming, bearing fruit and drying up. She also loves using native plants in her arrangements. McDowell says that by not mowing your grass or weeding your garden for a week, you can find interesting plants such as wild grasses to use in bouquets in your own yard. The key, she says, is adding multiple textures and types of flowers and plant material into an arrangement and using both blooming and non-blooming flowers.

“For winter, it’s really great to incorporate berries, things that are wispy, just have different shapes,” McDowell says. “I really like to mix things up so everything’s not just the same round ball or even types of greenery; I like to make sure that they look a little different from each other. … My own flower philosophy: I let the flower shape dictate its placement. So I pay attention to the way that the flower head is turned or the curve of the stem, and if you work with that and not against it, it’s actually a lot easier to make an arrangement that feels organic.“

It all comes down to trusting the flowers to give you the answers.

“I try to just listen to where the flowers tell me to put them,” McDowell says. “So really, it’s totally different placement for every arrangement.”

2. Process

Joyce Kuntze, owner of Arrangements by Joyce in Cape Girardeau, came to floristry by way of teaching. A physical education and sciences teacher, she began working at the shop part-time based on her experience working part-time in flower shops during high school and college. Forty years ago and shortly after she began working at this shop, she bought the business and went full-time as a florist.

She describes her floristry style as loose, with a soft, romantic look. She says they do a lot of vase arrangements and as a full-service florist, also arrange with silk flowers and sell plants.

When creating a vase arrangement, Kuntze says she begins by arranging “greenery in such a way that it will hold the stems of the flowers.” This, she says, is called a grid and helps hold the flowers in place once they are inserted into the vase. Next, she chooses the flowers she thinks have more physical and visual weight — the flowers with the most mass — to become her core flowers. She inserts those into the base. For balance and symmetry, she suggests centering three or four of these core flowers in the arrangement; the flowers do not have to be the same type of flower, but they should be similar in size, she says. From there, she fills in the perimeters of the arrangement with smaller flowers.

“The human eye will see the center of the arrangement first, so you don’t want the center to be naked or negative space,” Kuntze says. “You want there to be some positive space there, so the flowers need to be there. … Practice makes perfect.”

3. Use a unique container.

Wendy Durham, owner of Magnolia Market in Cape Girardeau, says she grew up loving flowers and gardening, using these pastimes as a creative outlet. Although she studied something unrelated in college and did a job in that field for a brief period of time, 14 years ago she opened Magnolia Market, where she creates floral arrangements for weddings and holidays. She describes her floristry style as a classic, traditional Southern vibe.

One of her basic tips when arranging flowers is not to cut the stem too short in the beginning, since you can’t put the stem back on once you’ve cut it. She also recommends getting creative and trying new things.

“Choose the right container; a container is key,” she says. “A container can really make an arrangement pop. So if you see something when you’re out and about and you’re like, ‘Oh, that would be pretty with flowers in it,’ grab it, arrange in it and then see where it takes you.”

With these tips, we hope you’re ready to try your own hand at arranging flowers. Happy creating!