I was out walking the dog first thing this morning and the trees are beginning to show green buds which always gives me hope for spring. In light of this I’d begun wondering over the weekend about using a combination of spring bulbs and cut flowers in a wreath as I have a couple of funerals coming up and wanted to see if it would work. Using a Compostable wreath base I can use moss in the base as my water source and therefore combine both items.
sustainable floristry
Keeping it simple, I used a combination of blue violas and narcissus. Spacing them out round the ring was the first step, I didn’t want it to be too symmetrical as you see from the photo below.
I then packed the rest of the wreath base with moss and made sure it was damp. I just poured cold water on it, making sure it was sopping at the end.
I had some magnolia foliage left over from a wedding so used that as the foliage, Its a good one to use as you can get a lot of use out of one stem. Whether it’s foliage or flowers that you are putting into the moss, you will need to twist the stems as they go. Moss is not like foam, so you can’t just poke the stem in otherwise it will break. I find it just takes a bit of practice to get used to it.
The one issue with spring flowers is that a lot of them have soft stems. Tulips and daffodils are a good example and need to be wired if you want to use them. You can see from the picture below of a wired tulip, make sure you use a decent thickness of wire for this, fine wire won’t help at all.
A wired tulip
Using whichever combination of flowers you like, start adding them into the moss. I had a bucket of leftover bits so the colours are all quite mad. I didn’t want the design to be uniform in anyway so I was poking the flowers out in all different directions. You can see this from where I placed the white stocks below.
When choosing flowers, always think about shape and texture. So the combination below includes flat headed flowers (the orange calendula). Pointy flowers like the snapdragons and stocks and finer headed flowers like the pale pink tulips.
I think the one thing I love about this design is that it will evolve as the viola and narcissus find their feet and begin to flower. The large headed daffs will open more and the tulip stems will grow so they will become more twisty. Its the overall joy of flowers!
Grace x