Garden Style Flower Arranging for Beginners Step-by-Step Floral Design Tutorial

Hello everyone, it's Alexis here and welcome back to my florist youtube channel. In today's video I'm going to teach you how to make a garden style arrangement step by step. I feel like when done right these pieces can look like art pieces that you would see at like a museum. Like they look like literal sculptures of flowers. I think they're absolutely gorgeous. I really do like the garden style a lot more than the traditional round arrangement. So without further ado let's get So we are going to be using floral foam today because I find that it's just easier to teach beginners to use floral foam than it is to use like chicken wire or any of the other products that are out there. So we are going to be using floral foam today. So we're going to start by just covering up our mechanics being the foam and I'm going to start by just clustering my flowers really tight to the base of the foam. I'm trying not to use a ton of greenery today so we're really going to use our flower stems as like the main focus to hide our mechanics. Usually in videos I use greenery to hide my mechanics but we're going to be using cheaper flowers like carnations. If you look at any of those higher end flower arrangements that you see on like Pinterest or Instagram they don't usually have a ton of greenery in them. It's mainly flower focused so that's why we're using carnations today instead of like filling in with greenery like I typically would. Now as I add in and cluster my carnations it's important that you cluster the colors together. So for example I clustered those two hot pink carnations together. Now I'm going to turn the arrangement around and cluster some light pink carnations in the back and whenever I'm clustering things I always like to work in odd numbers so working in threes, fives, I find that that just looks more pleasing to the eye. You also want to be creating triangles wherever you can with your flowers so like how I have those three pink carnations I have one, two, three that creates a nice triangle shape so always creating triangles and working in odd numbers is going to be key for these kinds of arrangements. Whenever I'm creating a garden style arrangement I always like to have two main focal flowers. Today we're going to be working with the gerber daisies and the roses as our main focal flowers. I also like to think of the arrangement as two halves when I have two of the focal flowers so I'll place one of the focal flowers on the right side of the arrangement and then the other focal flower on the left side of the arrangement and then I do a good job at blending the two focal flowers together in the middle to try to make it look more cohesive. I just find that this looks more organic and gardening like the type of arrangements you see online. So I'm using my lime flowers here to create a nice shape for my arrangement so whenever I'm designing a garden style design I always like to create like an s-shape so I like to have one side come up a little bit higher than the other side and I'm doing that by adding the stock flower on just one side of my arrangement and on the other side we're going to add the mini carnations and that's just going to give us like a nice balanced organic look. I find that when I cluster my alike flowers together it almost looks like it's growing out of a specific part of the arrangement and that to me just looks more organic and more fresh. Now I'm going to start adding in more of those focal flowers because I really want them to be like the showstopper of the arrangement. I start by placing either focal flower on each side of the arrangement because again I don't like mixing my focal flowers. I like to just try to keep one on one side and one on the other side of the arrangement. I just feel like it looks more natural that way. If you're ever stuck and you don't know what flower to place next and like what goes where just remember to follow the rule of thirds like always try to create triangles always try to work in odd numbers so like how I have two gerber daisies here I'm going to be placing a third one just to create our triangle effect because right now it's just looking like two sets of eyeballs but once I add that third gerber daisy it really just brings everything together. Now whatever I do to one side of my arrangement I'm going to mirror and do to the other side so I'm going to be placing more focal flowers in the back of my arrangement because remember you want all sides of your arrangement to look beautiful not just one side. Now I'm going to be taking my focal flowers my roses to be building up the right side of my arrangement and I'm going to be also using more carnations as well just to fill in those gaps and make it feel like a more a lush arrangement. I really like using mini carnations and full-size carnations to achieve this look because again they are a cheaper flower but they do a really good job at filling in the gaps. I highly encourage you to start your arrangement in this order because if you start by building out your shape of your arrangement first you usually end up needing to use a lot of greens and like filler flowers to fill in the center areas to like hide your mechanics so I find that it's best to just start low in your arrangement and then build out so that way you are for sure covering your mechanics you can't see any of the foil foam chicken wire whatever it is you're using will just not be visible. If you're having trouble figuring out where you should place your next flower stem just put the flower stem next to your arrangement in the area that you think it would look best in. One thing about flowers is that once you cut them they cannot regrow like that is it so make sure wherever you place them is the final placement especially if you're working with floral foam the more holes you create in the floral foam the weaker it becomes and the more like swiss cheese it gets you're gonna feel really frustrated so I definitely recommend to just like one and done placement your flowers. So here I'm just filling in any gaps where I see floral foam I'm just using these little purple mums to fill in the gaps because they're pretty much the same color as the stock and mums are like like one of those cheap flowers so I don't mind using a bunch of those to just fill in any gaps that I see. If you're ever wondering if there is an order in which we place the flower stems there is. So you always want to place your hardiest stems in first and then your more delicate stems in last. So here I am just placing that really delicate butterfly ranunculus I'm placing that one by one in towards the end of my design because again these are like wispy really delicate flower stems they could potentially get crushed and even broken while I'm arranging so it's always important to just like add those in towards the end because you don't want them to get crushed lost or even broken throughout your design process. I would say 90% of being a florist is just trial and error like you'll see me place a stem and then look at it and then be like I don't like it there and I'll place it somewhere else. Now I know I said once you place the stem you pretty much just want to be done with it but like I would say the job is just like trial and error figuring out where things look good placing replacing stems that's just part of the job. So if you ever place something you don't like it just pull it out reinsert it and try again it might just need a fresh spot. Now usually when I'm designing in my videos I place the greenery first but because we are doing a garden style arrangement I really wanted the flowers to be the main focus of the design and for the greenery to just be kind of like an accent. So here I am placing my greenery in last and I'm just filling in any gaps that I see that I think would be filled best with greens over flowers. So I'm just adding in those gaps filling in any spots that I see wherever my eye stops is where I will add filler flower and greenery. The front of the arrangement was kind of bothering me and I think I figured out it's because I didn't have three focal flowers in the front I only had two. Remember to always work in odd numbers because working in odd numbers is more pleasing to the eye and always creating those triangle shapes with the flowers as well that's going to help solve any gaps and fill in any holes that you have. Another big tip that I recommend you do is to actually take a picture of your flower arrangement once it's done. Once you take a picture of it you will actually see all the gaps and the spaces where you should have added flowers so I always recommend to take a break in between designing your arrangement take a picture give it some time look back at it and you will see all the spots that you need to fill in. So that's exactly what I did here I took a step back took a picture of it came back and I realized I needed another gerber daisy at the top and to remove those option carnations from the center. Here is my completed look I hope you enjoyed today's tutorial don't forget to like comment and subscribe follow me on instagram at flowersbyalexis and I will see you all soon with another video. Bye!