My 2020 Flower Growing Challenge
DIY flowers for weddings, friends, table settings and Mother’s Day
I am relatively new to the world of growing bunches of DIY flowers, I grew flowers before, especially for the bees, but I challenged myself to to stop buying store-bought flowers as gifts and to give only homegrown bunches of flowers to friends and family.
The reason I decided to go DIY with flowers is because I read Amy Stewart’s book Flower Confidential which outlined a pretty bleak picture of the flower trade and how most of us unwittingly buy flowers that have been sprayed with pesticides, held in cold storage for weeks, shipped from South America and picked by people who were paid an unliveable wage. I’m not okay with that.
When I first started giving my own bunches of DIY flowers to friends, I felt like they didn’t look good enough. They smelled amazing and fragrant and included many incredible types of blooms that you cannot get in any shop, but something was off.
So I spent some time working out how to get the amazing, interesting DIY flower bunches I wanted to give to my friends and here are 2 tricks I learned. One is the simple way and one is the more advanced version.
Trick #1: The 50/50 Foliage rule
Essentially what was making my bunches fall flat or look a little one dimensional was that I was missing foliage! Now I make sure that greenery or foliage makes up half on any bunch. Some of the foliage I adore is: Bells Of Ireland, Flax, Sweet Basil, Thai Basil and Honeywort and the upside of these is that they all smell divine too.
Trick #2: The Different Shapes rule
I read Erin Benzakein from Floret’s book and she explained that when creating a bunch of flowers she likes to put flowers into 5 “categories” and believes that a beautiful DIY bunch of flowers should include at least 1 flower from each category. They categories are:
Focal flower: something big and impressive like a Sunflower or Zinnia that all the other ingredients will go around as supporting actors
Air: something ethereal and interesting like Flax or Scabiosa
Foliage: some greenery to create bulk like Honeywort or Basil
Disc: something round and pretty like Cosmos or Calendula
Spike: something tall and spiky to add interest like Celosia or Snapdragon
If you are looking to grow DIY flowers with the hopes of making beautiful bunches of your own, then I recommend at least planting an equal amount of beautiful foliage and flowers. If you are advanced, then it could be also worth planting a flower or flowers from each of Floret’s categories above which will provide the ingredients for great bunches straight from the garden.